Seoul, Sep 30 (IANS) A total of 91 online government services have been restored in the wake of an outage caused by last week’s fire at the state data management agency, the government said on Tuesday.

The restoration rate stood at 14.1 percent, after 91 out of 647 services affected by Friday’s fire at the National Information Resources Service (NIRS) in Daejeon, about 140 kilometers south of Seoul, were brought back online, it said, reports Yonhap news agency.

The restored services included 20 out of 36 “Grade 1” services, or those considered essential based on their impact and number of users.

At a press briefing in the central administrative city of Sejong, Vice Interior Minister Kim Min-jae said systems on the second, third and fourth floors of the NIRS building have been reactivated as they were impacted less by the blaze, which broke out on the fifth floor.

The fire began in server room 7-1, destroying 96 systems, and spread to server rooms 7 and 8, damaging a total of 330 systems, or just over half.

“We found through on-site inspections of local government offices that with the normalisation of Gov.kr and unmanned civil application service machines, various civil application services used frequently and heavily by the public, such as for resident registration, seal and passport services, are not seeing a lot of confusion despite some inconveniences,” Kim said.

The vice minister still acknowledged outstanding defects in online services related to real estate transactions and social security information systems and vowed to continue to provide updated information on system recoveries and alternative solutions.

The government earlier said it will disclose the full list of the 647 affected services and its recovery plans. A full recovery is expected to take at least four weeks, it said, up from the initial timeline of two weeks, given the time needed to relocate the 96 destroyed systems to the NIRS’ branch in the southeastern city of Daegu.

“Above all, we will conduct the recovery work transparently,” Interior Minister Yun Ho-jung said during a meeting of the government’s Central Disaster and Safety Countermeasures Headquarters.

To minimise public inconveniences, especially ahead of the extended Chuseok holiday, which begins Friday, the government has first restored services expected to be in high demand, including the postal and banking arms of the national postal service.

Gov.kr, a major government portal for civil application services, has also been restored.

A police investigation is under way into the cause of the fire, which began after a lithium-ion battery exploded in a server room on the fifth floor of the NIRS and was completely extinguished Saturday.

—IANS

na/