North Korea was hit with a major internet outage that lasted for several hours, disrupting the service across the country, including official government websites.
According to Reuters, North Korea early on Saturday experienced a “major” internet blackout that lasted for around nine hours. The outage affected the official news, including main official news services, the Foreign Ministry, the Air Koryo national airline and email services.
A UK-based researcher who monitors the North Korean internet, Junade Ali, said that the entire internet infrastructure of the country, including Domain Name System (DNS) servers, was disconnected during the outage that hit the country between 2 and 3 am KST.
A cyber attack on North Korea?
Ali described that Pyongyang was “wiped off the face of the internet” in a “major” outage. However, the reason behind the outage is unclear, but it is believed that it was due to an internal issue rather than a cyberattack, as connections via China and Russia were affected.
“Hard to say if this is intentional or accidental – but it seems like this is internal rather than an attack,” he added.
Meanwhile, Nicholas Roy, who runs the North Korean Internet blog, told NK News, If it was a mistake, it seems more than a misconfiguration, and something else is keeping them offline.”
Notably, North Korea has one of the world's most strictly controlled internet systems even the access of the citizens to any online communication is overlooked. People can only access government and cannot connect to the global network.
