The government’s online procurement system went down for about an hour on Thursday morning due to a flood of traffic from overseas.

According to the Public Procurement Service on Thursday, the administrative computer network experienced a blackout from 9:19 a.m. to 10:21 a.m., inconveniencing users as Nara Market Place went offline.

Both the ruling and opposition parties criticized the Ministry of Interior and Safety over a series of administrative computer network disruptions that occurred over the past week.

At a plenary session with the National Assembly’s Public Administration and Security Committee, vice Interior Minister Ko Ki-dong repeatedly apologized for the successive failures and vowed to prepare measures to prevent a recurrence.