Prime Minister Kim Boo-kyum apologized Tuesday for inconveniences caused by an outage of the government's digital COVID-19 vaccine pass system after authorities began enforcing the system in restaurants and other multiuse facilities across the country.

In a Cabinet meeting held at the government office complex in Seoul, Kim said he "sincerely apologized for causing inconvenience to the public" with the vaccine pass system outage on Monday.

"Yesterday was the launch day in enforcing the vaccine pass system but access (to the application) was throttled as user traffic was concentrated at a certain time," Kim added.

The prime minister instructed health authorities to swiftly stabilize the system and come up with measures to prevent another outage.

Following a one-week trial period, the country officially began its vaccine pass system Monday, requiring all visitors to cafes and restaurants to present a certificate proving they have completed their COVID-19 vaccination or tested negative.

Many people, however, experienced difficulties accessing either the government's digital vaccine authentication system or authentications of QR codes through other popular services, such as Naver, Kakao Talk and Toss Bank, around lunch time. (Yonhap)