Battery fire at SK C&C Pangyo data centre causes major service outage in South Korea

A fire broke out at 15:19 on 15 October 2022 in the battery room on the third basement floor of the SK C&C Pangyo data centre in South Korea, and was extinguished at 23:45. A joint investigation by the Ministry of Science and ICT, the Korea Communications Commission and the National Fire Agency, announced on 6 December 2022, found the fire started from a battery but could not identify the exact cause of ignition. The Battery Management System, which monitors battery temperature and other factors, showed no abnormal signs until just before the fire. Because the lithium-ion batteries were in a space not completely physically separated from some uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), heat from the fire caused the UPS to malfunction, leading to partial loss of power supply. To prevent electric leakage before water was sprayed to extinguish the fire, the entire power supply was cut off, and servers that no longer received power from the stopped UPS shut down. The event disrupted value-added communication services including Kakao and Naver. Casualties were not reported in the source. The batteries were supplied by SK On.

Lack of complete physical separation between the lithium-ion battery space and some UPS equipment; no abnormal indications from the Battery Management System before ignition; full power shutdown required for safe firefighting, which cascaded into service loss. The precise ignition mechanism was not identified by investigators.

1. Physically separate battery rooms from UPS and other critical electrical equipment so that heat from a battery fire cannot disable backup supplies.
2. Battery Management System data may show no anomaly shortly before a fire, so complementary detection such as thermal imaging or off-gas sensing should be considered.
3. Emergency plans should anticipate that de-energising a site for safe firefighting can cause cascading loss of dependent services, and should define priorities in advance.
4. Where a forensic investigation cannot establish an ignition cause, publishing the underlying technical data helps operators and the wider industry learn from the event.

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