It was a Saturday afternoon in October 2022 when South Korea basically stopped working. You might remember the headlines about the South Korea data center fire, but unless you were there, it’s hard to grasp how eerie it felt.
Imagine trying to pay for a coffee and your app won't open. You try to call a taxi—nothing. You message your mom to say you're running late, but the "sent" icon just spins forever. For most of the world, KakaoTalk is just another messaging app. In Korea, it is the oxygen of the digital economy. And on that day, the oxygen was cut off.
The blaze broke out in a basement battery room at the SK C&C building in Pangyo. It wasn't a massive, skyscraper-level inferno, but in the world of high-density computing, a small spark in the wrong place is a catastrophe.
Why a few batteries paralyzed a whole nation
The fire started around 3:33 p.m. It sounds like a tech-thriller cliché, but the reality was much more grounded: a lithium-ion battery in an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) system caught fire.
The fire department had to shut down the power to the entire building to keep the firefighters safe while they pumped water into a basement filled with high-voltage equipment. This "safety first" move was what actually killed the internet.
While the fire was contained relatively quickly, the fallout lasted days. Kakao, the giant behind the "everything app" KakaoTalk, had over 32,000 servers in that one building. Because their backup systems were—honestly—not as redundant as they claimed, the outage dragged on for over 120 hours for some services.
The brutal reality of "Single Point of Failure"
We talk about the "cloud" like it's some magical, floating entity. It’s not. It’s a physical building with wires, air conditioning, and, unfortunately, highly flammable batteries.
The South Korea data center fire exposed a massive lie that many tech companies tell themselves: "We have backups." Kakao had backups, sure. But many of those backups lived in the same building or relied on the same central "auth" servers that were currently melting in Pangyo.
- KakaoTalk: 47 million users went silent.
- Kakao Pay: People couldn't pay for groceries or transit.
- Kakao T: Taxi drivers couldn't find passengers; passengers couldn't find rides.
- Naver: Even the "Google of Korea" took a hit, though they recovered faster because they actually had a more distributed server map.
The 2025 "Echo" fire: Did we learn anything?
Fast forward to late 2025. You’d think the country would have fixed this, right?
In September 2025, another fire broke out at the National Information Resources Service (NIRS) in Daejeon. The irony is almost too much to handle. This fire happened during a maintenance project designed to move lithium-ion batteries out of server rooms to make them safer.
Workers were trying to relocate UPS systems when sparks flew. This triggered thermal runaway—that's the technical term for when a battery gets so hot it starts a self-sustaining fire that is nearly impossible to put out.
The 2025 South Korea data center fire knocked out 647 government services.
Everything from mobile IDs to postal banking went dark.
It was a "flabbergasting disaster," according to local editorials. President Lee Jae-myung had to issue a public apology because the government had spent three years yelling at private companies like Kakao to fix their redundancy, only to have their own "failsafe" government servers fall over from a single spark in a basement.
The Lithium-Ion problem nobody wants to talk about
We love lithium-ion batteries. They're in our phones, our cars, and they keep data centers running when the grid blinks. But they have a dark side.
In a data center, these batteries are packed tight. To save space, they’re often less than two feet away from the servers they’re supposed to protect. When one cell fails, it’s like a domino effect.
✨ Don't miss: Verizon Phone Claim Insurance: What Most People Get Wrong About Repairs and Replacements
The industry is now frantically looking at alternatives:
- LFP Batteries: Lithium Iron Phosphate. They don't hold as much energy, but they are way harder to set on fire.
- Sodium-Ion: Newer tech that uses salt. It's cheaper and safer, but still in the "early adopter" phase for big data centers.
- Solid-State: The holy grail. No liquid inside means no leaks and no explosions. But it’s expensive. Like, really expensive.
What you should do now
If you’re a business owner or just someone who relies on digital tools, these fires are a wake-up call. You can't trust the "big guys" to always be up.
Diversify your digital life. If your business runs entirely on one platform—whether it's Kakao, Google, or AWS—you are one basement fire away from a total shutdown.
Check your redundancy. Don't just ask if your data is backed up. Ask where it's backed up. If the primary and the backup are in the same region, or worse, the same city, you don't actually have a backup. You have a copy that will burn at the same time as the original.
Physical documentation matters. The 2025 fire proved that when mobile IDs fail, people can't even get through airport security easily. Keep a physical copy of your most critical documents. It sounds old-school, but when the server is melting, a piece of paper is the most high-tech tool you own.
South Korea is still the world's most "wired" nation, but these incidents have shown that the more connected we are, the more vulnerable we become to a single malfunctioning battery in a dark basement.
The government's new AI Basic Act, set for 2026, is trying to bake safety into the law, but laws don't stop thermal runaway. Only better engineering and true, painful redundancy can do that.