North Korea’s limited internet hit by major outage, says analyst

A monitor from the United Kingdom believes that North Korea’s internet access has experienced a significant downtime, but the exact culprit may be internal rather than a cyberattack.

Junade Ali, a researcher who monitors the North Korean internet, reported on Saturday that systems that monitor global internet activity do not register the secretive nation’s entire internet infrastructure.

All routes, whether they enter through China or Russia, are currently experiencing a significant outage on North Korea’s internet, according to Ali.

Although it’s difficult to determine whether this was intentional or unintentional, he said it seems like it’s internal rather than an attack.

Pyongyang maintains a number of government websites with access to the outside, including those for the Foreign Ministry and official news organizations like the Korea Central News Agency (KCNA). When Al Jazeera attempted to access these sites on Saturday morning, both of them were down.

It is believed that Chinese servers provide the majority of the country’s internet traffic and links.

North Koreans only have about 25 million people who have direct access to the global internet, according to estimates.

Kwangmyong, a highly regulated and carefully curated intranet, is available to citizens of North Korea when access to the authoritarian nation is strictly restricted.

In the past, the nation has been the target of cyberattacks, including one in January 2022 when American-based hacker Alejandro Caceres used distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to shut down every publicly accessible North Korean website.

Officials from the US and the UN have accused North Korean leader Kim Jong Un of running armies of hackers domestically as part of an expanding global cyber theft campaign.