Major Internet Outage Hits North Korea: Possible Internal Causes Revealed

North Korea suffered a “nation-wide internet disruption” that lasted roughly nine hours, according to the BBC, today which took down all of the nation’s online network.

Though the reason for the outages has yet to be officially confirmed, independent cyber researchers and other analysts following the country’s limited national internet infrastructure mostly agree that the outages were not because of some foreign cyberwarfare.

The disruption, which came in the early hours of Saturday (KST), made sites key for the country unreachable to users, such as official news services, the Foreign Ministry and even the national airline Air Koryo. Email services were also disrupted, reports said.

According to Junade Ali, a UK- based researcher which specialises in monitoring the North Korean internet, the whole infrastructure of the country, including both its DNS (Domain Name System) servers and its Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing tables, seemed to cut off from the global system. This effectively “wiped” Pyongyang off the internet, Ali said.

Most crucially, the outage affected every route, even those through China and Russia, making it hard not to see a Chinese hand behind the outage. Earlier and more limited outages in North Korea have at times come during a period of claims in the country that its internet service was at least partially disrupted by hackers working against the regime.

Yet, the broad-reaching nature of the disruption , attacking essential routing infrastructure , indicates a more systemic problem with the tightly managed network within the country.

North Korea is believed to have one of the world’s most restrictive internet environments, with global access limited to a handful of individuals in the government and leadership. The public is limited to a national intranet called “Kwangmyong.” So whatever the cause, any interference is going to do a lot more in terms of the state’s external communications and minimal online presence.

Although little is known about the cause, such internal errors could stem from technical blunders — such as misconfigurations or hardware problems — or could be intentional on the part of the regime. Because it is so difficult to peer into North Korea’s digital operations, a clear answer may never materialize.

But the episode underscores the native brittleness of the country’s heavily centralized and walled-off internet, which is prone to internal failures that can effectively block its already-fragile link to the global network. By midday KST a degree of service appeared to have been restored, but the length of the blackout illustrated the peculiar risks facing North Korea’s digital realm.