South Korean data center ran 12-yr-old batteries 60cm from servers — 647 systems down

On 26 September 2025 a lithium-ion battery exploded during a routine risk-reduction exercise to relocate UPS units at South Korea's NIRS data center in Daejeon, the backbone of government digital services. The batteries, made by LG Energy Solution and installed in 2012-13, had already exceeded their rated 10-year lifespan, and the UPS racks sat about 60cm from the server racks they protected. Firefighters fought the blaze for roughly 22 hours, using CO2 suppression rather than water to avoid spreading the chemical fire.

The blast destroyed 384 batteries and knocked out 647 government systems — 96 destroyed outright and 551 shut down pre-emptively. Some agencies lost data that could not be recovered, and the National Cyber Security Center raised the cyber threat level from Attention to Caution. The fire echoed the 2022 KakaoTalk outage and forced President Lee Jae-myung to call the disaster 'foreseeable', as the facility had no real twin-server failover despite being the government's redundancy hub.

The failure was a design decision, not an act of God: batteries kept in service past their rated life, installed dangerously close to the servers they were meant to protect, and a backup system that could not actually take over. The Critical Information Infrastructure handled by NIRS — immigration, land registration, customs — went dark for weeks, with one official noting the recovery could span a month.