Almost all North Korean websites go offline for more than a day
in plain words
Almost every website in North Korea has stopped working for more than a day. State news sites and government pages are among those down. Nobody has said what caused the problem yet.
Full summary
Almost every North Korean website has been unreachable for more than 24 hours, cutting people outside the country off from information the state publishes online. The disruption began around 11 a.m. Korean time on Tuesday, when several sites failed at once, including those of the Korean Central News Agency, the Rodong Sinmun and Minju Joson newspapers, and the external broadcaster Voice of Korea.
The official information portal Naenara, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the national airline Air Koryo and the DPRK Portal, which lists official North Korean sites, have been down since then too. The news agency came back online at intervals on Tuesday but was offline for 19 of the 24 hours after the first failure, data from the web-monitoring service Pingdom shows. Most other sites stayed down, with brief periods of access on Wednesday morning adding up to about 10 minutes. The Silibank SMTP email server has also been offline since Tuesday morning, apart from five minutes of access on Wednesday.
The reasons are not yet clear. The disruptions appear linked to problems with the Ryugyong-dong network, which has relied on internet supplied by China Unicom through IP Internet Protocol The internet's basic rules for sending data, using numeric addresses for every connected device. Full definition of IP tied to the Hong Kong-based network Cenbong. The Russian company TransTeleCom has served as an alternate provider since 2017, and both Chinese and Russian services have sent traffic through a secondary Philippines-based network since 2023. Despite these backup routes, connectivity has stayed at a standstill for more than a day. Sporadic access resumed around 11:30 a.m. on Wednesday, but the sites were still offline as of 1 p.m.
Several explanations have been weighed. A deliberate order from authorities seems unlikely, since the news agency kept transmitting reports by wire. A surge in outside traffic overloading servers is also considered unlikely, because the outage hit nearly all sites, not only news ones. Maintenance on internet infrastructure, particularly routes entering from China, is a possibility, and North Korea has taken its websites offline for long periods before during overhauls, although this outage is longer than typical maintenance.
Some have speculated about an external attack. Past disruptions include one in 2014, after North Korean cybercriminals breached Sony Pictures’ networks, when activist hackers took the country’s limited websites offline for about 10 hours. In early 2022, American hacker Alejandro Caceres, who used the name P4x, ran distributed denial-of-service attacks against North Korean websites and email, saying he did so in response to North Korean attempts to steal information about software vulnerabilities from security researchers. However, there is no clear evidence yet of an external attack this time, and no claims of responsibility have been reported.