A fire at South Korea's state data center has brought around 70 government services offline.

A lithium battery fire was reported at the National Information Resources Service in the central city of Daejeon, starting at around 8:20pm local time.

Some 73 firefighters and 70 fire vehicles have been deployed. One person has been reported injured with first-degree burns on their face and arm.

Prime Minister Kim Min-seok has called on all resources to be mobilized to put out the fire, and said that the interior ministry should work to restore resources quickly.

The government's email system currently does not work, while a number of government websites are offline. The online government platform for complaints and petitions similarly does not work.

Back in 2022, a lithium-ion battery fire impacted a building in Panyo owned by SK Group, which houses data centers for Kakao and Naver.

That incident caused a lengthy outage at Kakao, impacting the KakaoTalk messaging platform, which is used by the vast majority of South Korea's population and is regarded as practically a national communications infrastructure.

Following the outage, Korean police raided the offices of SK Group and the SK data center, and the government imposed safety drills on data centers.