Nationwide "Saeol" Network Outage Paralyzes Government Services

On November 17, 2023, South Korea’s "Saeol" administrative network—used by civil servants to issue documents—suffered a catastrophic outage. The failure extended to the "Government24" portal, preventing citizens from obtaining residence certificates and other legal papers for over two days. The government eventually attributed the outage to a "malfunctioning L4 switch and a faulty network router," ruling out external hacking but facing severe criticism for poor disaster recovery.