South Korea, a world leader in digital government, underwent a huge system failure this weekend. The outage forced the government to operate manually while civil services were paused.

The Ministry of Interior and Safety, which oversees the e-government systems, said that it was due to a glitch in the network. Their National Intelligence Service said that it is exploring various possibilities, including cyberattacks and deploying its experts to identify the cause of the failure and recover the system.

The main opposition Democratic Party of Korea called on President Yoon Suk Yeol to apologize to the people over the latest meltdown of the government’s online systems and fire the minister in charge -- Minister of Interior and Safety Lee Sang-min - from his post.

Prime Minister Han Duck-soo issued an apology in an address on Saturday, for the “inconvenience and confusion caused to South Korean people” because of the outage affecting the government’s online services. “What we witnessed goes on to show the extent of the chaos that can arise from an imperfect digital system,” he said in the address. “Our authorities are at work to determine what caused it, and how we can prevent it from happening again.” Read more about this story on our LinkedIn page