South Korea scrambles to restore services after major state data centre fire

A major fire at South Korea‘s national data centre has crippled some government online services and internal networks, prompting a race on Saturday to bring the systems back online and a probe of what sparked a lithium-ion battery to start the blaze.

The fire is suspected to have started with an explosion on Friday night of the battery produced by South Korea’s LG Energy Solution during maintenance, damaging some servers and forcing the shutdown of hundreds of others, officials said.

The fire led to a “thermal runaway“, producing extreme heat in the…