Comment by pammf
9 days ago
Real reason is humans are way too optimistic in planning and, for some reason, tend to overlook even more rare, but catastrophic risks.
I’m almost sure that the system had some sort of local replication and versioning that was enough to deal with occasional deletions, rollbacks, and single non-widespread hardware failures, so only the very catastrophic scenario of losing all servers at the same time (that for sure wouldn’t happen anytime soon) was uncovered.
At a previous job I was not allowed to do disaster planning with customers, after I told one of them that it was entirely possible to take out both our datacenters with one plane crash. The two locations where a "safe" distance apart, but where also located fairly close the approach of an airport, and a crashing passenger jet is big enough to take out both buildings.
Apparently I plan for the rather rare catastrophes, and not those customers care about day to day.
However it's also possible that an asteroid could destroy everything or a nuclear war.
But it's extra surprising, because South Korea is a country where every young man is conscripted due to the threat of war with the north. If the conflict is serious enough for that, why hasn't someone thought about losing all the government data in a single artillery strike?