Internet service restored in North Korea

After more than nine hours and 30 minutes, Internet service has been restored in North Korea, according to technology news service Dyn Research. Access is only partial, Reuters reports, but the country’s main news service and newspaper both are back online.

North Korea’s Internet went offline days after President Obama pledged a “proportional response” to the communist country’s alleged hacking of Sony Pictures, multiple news reports say.

Doug Madory, the director of Internet analysis at Dyn Research, told The New York Times and other news organizations that North Korea’s Internet access became unstable late Friday. By Monday, it was offline, he said.

It’s unclear what caused the outage, but State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said: “We aren’t going to discuss publicly operational details about the possible response options or comment on those kind of reports in any way except to say that as we implement our responses, some will be seen, some may not be seen.”

In an interview with NPR’s Elise Hu, Matthew Prince, chief executive of CloudFlare, pointed to four possible scenarios: North Korea turned off its own Internet; China’s upstream provider turned it off; the country’s routers failed at an unfortunate time; or it was the result of a denial-of-service attack from either a hacking group or the U.S.

[NPR]

This entry was posted in DPRK Government by Grant Montgomery.