Govt. working to restore administrative network after major disruption

The government was working to fix the administrative network that suffered a system failure, officials said Sunday, two days after the breakdown caused disruptions to public access to government-approved papers.

More than 100 government officials and private technicians were working to restore the servers and network systems at the National Information Resources Service in Daejeon, 139 kilometers south of Seoul, the interior ministry said.

They have replaced some of the network equipment believed to have caused the system breakdown and conducted several tests at local community centers to see if the on-site issuance of the documents was working as normal.

No problems were found in the tests, but officials said they are working to normalize the system considering the network traffic will sharply increase after the weekend, they said.

Officials said they aim to have the system back to normal by Monday.

The Saeol administrative network, a system used by public workers to access government-approved documents, such as birth certificates and resident registration papers, has been down since Friday due to an apparent error in the authentication process.

The system failure paralyzed both offline and online issuances of the civil documents, with the suspension of the widely used online portal, Government 24, causing massive delays in and disruptions to public access across the country.

The Government 24 portal was temporarily restored on Saturday and is currently accessible both on the web and mobile.

IT experts dispatched to the NIRS are trying to determine the exact cause of the system failure, officials said. A possible error from a recent system upgrade has been cited as a likely reason for the system failure. (Yonhap)