State audit board finds beleaguered NIRS failed to manage old equipment properly
Published: 29 Sep. 2025, 19:35
![The National Information Resources Service (NIRS) headquarters in Daejeon on Sept. 29 [JOONGANG ILBO]](https://koreaseafood.online/data/photo/2025/09/29/af08a143-a353-437b-88b9-7fbd5de4855b.jpg)
The National Information Resources Service (NIRS) headquarters in Daejeon on Sept. 29 [JOONGANG ILBO]
The Board of Audit and Inspection (BAI) concluded in a report released on Monday that the National Information Resources Service (NIRS), which lies at the center of a government-wide IT outage triggered by a recent fire, had failed to manage aging equipment properly.
The audit focused on a previous nationwide network failure in November 2023, which had paralyzed 189 administrative information systems — including Government24 (Gov24) — and caused services such as resident registration certificate issuance to be suspended. The incident is the same one President Lee Jae Myung referenced Sunday when he criticized the "lack of swift disaster recovery measures and system redundancy, even after the 2023 debacle."
The audit found that the cause of the 2023 incident was a faulty port in a router — a key piece of equipment that transmits data between networks. The router in question had been in service for eight years since 2015. The BAI described the equipment as “significantly aged.”
The audit also warned that the older the equipment, the more likely it is to fail. According to the NIRS's own plans for an integrated IT infrastructure plan for the government between 2021 and 2023, the failure rate of IT equipment used for more than seven years was 2.4 to 2.6 times higher than that of equipment used for less than seven years.
One reason the aging equipment had not been replaced was the NIRS's revision of its internal service life standards — the recommended replacement cycles. Initially, the recommended service life for key IT equipment was four to five years; however, in 2022, it was extended to six to nine years. As a result, even high-risk systems were left running past their optimal replacement periods. The router involved in the 2023 failure, for example, had its service life extended from six years in 2008 to nine years in 2022.
![The National Information Resources Service (NIRS) in Daejeon [JOONGANG ILBO]](https://koreaseafood.online/data/photo/2025/09/29/670896e0-fb8b-4634-8dd7-f3f721be60b6.jpg)
The National Information Resources Service (NIRS) in Daejeon [JOONGANG ILBO]
As of 2023, 34.6 percent of the NCIA’s equipment had exceeded its standard service life, based on the 2021 benchmark. That means roughly one-third of the agency’s equipment was past due for replacement and more likely to fail.
The audit attributed this to persistent budget delays. “As replacement budgets are postponed, actual usage periods get longer, which in turn leads to longer designated service lives,” the BAI wrote. “Since replacement budgets are typically allocated only after equipment has exceeded its designated service life, the growing number of outdated devices delays budget approvals even further — creating a vicious cycle.”
However, the audit focused on servers, storage, networking and security systems — the key equipment implicated in the 2023 failure — and did not include batteries, which were at the center of the most recent fire.
The lack of disaster recovery (DR) systems and data center redundancy also came under renewed scrutiny following the fire. This issue had previously been flagged during an audit of “Intelligent Information Projects” last year, during which the BAI instructed the NCIA administrator to develop DR systems for all high-priority systems classified as Level 1 or 2. The latest fire confirmed that those systems still had not been put in place.
This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.
BY YOON SUNG-MIN [[email protected]]
with the Korea JoongAng Daily
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