Vice interior minister Ko Ki-dong on Thursday said that he is sorry for last week’s system failure of the government’s administrative computer system, but he does not see it as a digital disaster. 

The vice minister made the remarks during a plenary session of the parliamentary committee on public administration and security. 

Attending the session on behalf of interior minister Lee Sang-min who is on a business trip abroad, the vice minister offered apology for the system failure repeatedly, but avoided answers on ways to compensate for and identify the cause of the outage. 

Asked if the incident was a digital disaster, Ko said that he did not see it a digital disaster in light of low possibility of the damage expanding and lasting.
 
The vice minister, however, acknowledged that there were significant flaws and said that he had no intention of avoiding or evading responsibility.

Asked about the compensation plan for those who suffered inconvenience and damage, Ko said that the government retroactively issued six-thousand-544 civil documents that could not be handled on time due to the network failure. 

Earlier on Thursday, the government’s online procurement system went down for about an hour, three days after the administrative computer network suffered a major failure, causing massive inconveniences to public services across the country.