[2026 Parliamentary Audit] 'Early Admissions System Outage': Uway Says "Advance Testing Inadequate"; Education Ministry to "Prepare Measures by November"

October 12 National Assembly Education Committee audit
Ministry of Education and Uway criticized for conflicting explanations of outage cause
Ministry of Education: "We will complete improvement measures by November"

Uway Apply, the company handling applications for the 2027 early university admissions process, said it did not conduct advance testing of the connected servers when upgrading their operating system (OS), in connection with an outage in the application system.

At a parliamentary audit by the National Assembly’s Education Committee on October 12, Uway Apply CEO Seong Yoonseok responded to a question from committee chair Kim Heejung about whether the system had been checked in advance during the OS upgrade. “When we installed the OS, we did not test the connected server before installing it,” he said.

“We judged it to be safe because a different OS had previously been installed and run on the web server and database (DB) server for a year and a half,” Seong said. “We thought it had been validated through actual services after installation, but in hindsight, our checks were inadequate.”

“When carrying out an OS upgrade of this significance, you should set up a mirror server,” Kim said. “Why didn’t you do that for something as important as university admissions?”

Seong replied, “I’m sorry. Our judgment at the time was inadequate.”

Differences between the explanations submitted to the National Assembly by the Ministry of Education and Uway about the cause of the outage also came under scrutiny.

“The Ministry of Education has cited causes including a failure to inspect the system after the OS change and a failure to conduct load testing,” Kim said. “But today, Uway said it is analyzing and verifying whether compatibility issues after the OS upgrade contributed to the outage. What is the ministry’s explanation?”

Seol Sehoon, head of the Ministry of Education’s Planning and Coordination Office, replied, “The points you have raised are among the matters that are being provisionally confirmed in the special investigation.”

Seong said, “Since the investigation is ongoing, we have some confidence in the cause we have estimated, but we cannot make a premature statement. That is why we reported it as an estimate.”

Kim criticized the officials, asking, “Is this really the time for the Ministry of Education, which is overseeing the investigation, and the company in charge to be giving such different accounts of the cause of the outage?”

The Ministry of Education plans to complete its special investigation into the cause of the outage and develop improvement measures by November.

“We will address the various issues you mentioned regarding the manuals and contracts before the regular admissions process,” Seol said. “We will also complete the improvement measures as far as possible by November and report back.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.