North Korea's Internet Restored amid US Hacking Dispute

• By Matt Holden
• Dec 23, 2014

North Korea experienced a complete Internet outage for hours before links were restored on Tuesday, according to a report. U.S. officials said Washington was not involved.

Dyn, a company that monitors Internet infrastructure, said the reason for the outage was unknown but it could range from glitches to a hacking attack. U.S. officials said the government had not taken any cyber action against Pyongyang.

Dyn said North Korea’s Internet links were unstable on Monday and the country later went completely offline. The possibilities for the outage could be attacks by individuals, a hardware failure, or even that it was done by North Korea itself.

Matthew Prince, CEO of CloudFare, said the fact that North Korea’s Internet was back up “is pretty good evidence that the outage wasn’t caused by a state-sponsored attack, otherwise it’d likely still be down.”

North Korea is one of the least-connected nations in the world, and very few of its 24 million people have access to the Internet.