South Korea’s government has warned that recovering systems compromised by a fire at a data center last week could take up to a month.

A battery fire at the National Information Resources Service (NIRS) data center, located in the city of Daejeon, impacted 647 government services, ministers said.

As of Monday, only 73 of these services had been restored, according to Korea’s Central Disaster and Safety Countermeasures Headquarters, and bringing the others online could take several weeks.

Speaking to reporters on Monday, Kim Min-jae, Vice Minister of the Ministry of the Interior and Safety, said services would be rebuilt on a public-private cloud cluster based at the NIRS headquarters in Daegu.

It is expected to take two weeks to secure the necessary IT infrastructure and another two weeks to rebuild the systems. Korea’s government had previously stated this whole process would take two weeks.

“We are aiming to shorten the schedule as much as possible by cooperating with the Daegu center,” Kim said, in comments reported by Asia News Network.

The lithium battery fire started at 8.20pm on Friday, September 26, in one of the data center’s server rooms. Some 73 firefighters and 70 fire vehicles were deployed to combat the blaze, and one person was reported injured with first-degree burns on their face and arm.

After the fire was fully extinguished on Saturday, authorities opened a forensic investigation at the NIRS headquarters. Three lithium battery experts are among a team of 20 investigators drafted in by Daejeon’s Metropolitan Police to try to discover what caused the blaze to start.

NIRS provides 1,600 systems as part of South Korea’s e-government service for citizens, as well as acting as an IT services provider for local and national government agencies. Its systems reportedly operate from three data centers, with the Daejeon site providing a third of capacity.

Systems that went offline simultaneously after the fire included the 119 emergency call service, as well as online postal services and government email servers.