President Lee Jae-myung on Sunday apologized for a blaze that crippled South Korea’s core government data center and ordered a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s digital infrastructure. Lee said the lithium-battery fire that erupted Friday at the National Information Resources Service (NIRS) facility in Daejeon destroyed 96 critical systems and forced the shutdown of hundreds more. He pledged “over-preparedness” in future safeguards and promised that citizens would not face penalties for missed tax filings or other obligations while services remain down.

Officials said restoration could take up to two weeksas engineers migrate the destroyed systems to a backup cloud