More than 100 people had to be evacuated after a fire broke out at a data center in Seoul, South Korea.

Firefighters were called to tackle the blaze at the data center in the Gasan-dong area of the Geumcheon-gu district at 11:55 am on Tuesday, September 29. Eighty officers and 14 fire engines were dispatched, and they extinguished the fire by 3:13 pm.

Geumcheon Fire Department said there were no casualties as a result of the fire, but 105 people had to be evacuated due to the incident. Investigations into the cause of the blaze continue, but it is thought to have originated in a transformer in the data center’s uninterruptible power supply (UPS) room.

Update:

Though the fire department did not name the data center involved, STTGDC has confirmed to DCD that the blaze occurred at its Seoul 1 facility. The 30MW, 40,000 sqm (430,556 sq ft) facility was launched in July, having first been announced in 2021.

A spokesperson for STTGDC said: "Smoke was generated following an electrical component failure while new electrical equipment was being tested at STT Seoul 1 in a test environment separate from the systems supporting customer operations.

"Emergency response services conducted thorough checks and confirmed that there was no ongoing risk to electrical or life safety. There was no impact on customer systems, services, or overall data center operations."

Original story continues:

Though data centers are relatively rare, South Korea’s government suffered devastating losses after a blaze at the National Information Resources Service (NIRS) data center, located in the city of Daejeon, last September. It is thought that 858TB of government information, held on hard drives that had not been backed up, was lost in the blaze.