At around 3:50 p.m. on Oct. 22, the trial-work system of Korea's courts and part of their public online services stopped working nationwide. They were restored around 6 p.m., and the National Court Administration says every system is now running normally.
Two hours from about 4 p.m.
The failure began in the courts' trial-work system. Reports say the whole judicial computer system, including warrant processing, was affected, causing trouble for courts and users.
The judiciary's IT office sent an urgent notice to every court right after the failure and started recovery work.
"Not hacking"
A National Court Administration official said the outage was "unrelated to PHP or hacking". PHP is a programming language widely used to build websites, and a critical security flaw in it had recently come to light.
The exact cause and the effect on trial work are still being investigated. The administration apologised for the inconvenience.
Back to normal
If court online services would not load for you between 4 and 6 p.m., the administration says they are now working normally. No cause has been announced yet.
Aerial view of the Supreme Court of Korea in Seocho-dong, Seoul (taken June 2020; file photo, not related to the outage). Seoul Institute / CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
