SEOUL: A major fire at South Korea`s national data centre has crippled some government online services and internal networks, prompting a race on Saturday to bring the systems back online and a probe of what sparked a lithium-ion battery to start the blaze.

The fire is suspected to have started with an explosion on Friday night of the battery produced by South Korea`s LG Energy Solution during maintenance, damaging some servers and forcing the shutdown of hundreds of others, officials said.

The fire led to a `thermal runaway`, producing extreme heat in the server room at the National Information Resources Services in the city of Daejeon, preventing firefighters from takingaggressive actions to contain the blaze, fire and government officials said in press briefings. The national data service acts as a cloud server for many government services and databases for the heavily wired Asian country. It operates data centres in other locations.

The fire, which began around 8:20pm, was brought under control early on Saturday, but more than 600 servers remained in forced shutdown to protect data while firefighters worked to extract nearly 400 battery packs from the building as safety measures, officials said.

The cause of the initial spark was not known and was under investigation, they said. LG Energy Solution declined to comment as the case is under investigation.-Reuters