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

Internet access in North Korea has experienced a major outage, according to a United Kingdom-based monitor, but the exact cause may be internal rather than the result of a cyberattack.

Junade Ali, a researcher who monitors the North Korean internet, said on Saturday that the secretive country’s entire internet infrastructure is not registering on systems that monitor global internet activity.

“A major outage is currently occurring on North Korea’s internet – affecting all routes whether they come in via China or Russia,” Ali said.

“Hard to say if this is intentional or accidental – but seems like this is internal rather than an attack,” he said.

Pyongyang maintains several externally accessible government websites, including those for its Foreign Ministry and official news sources such as the Korea Central News Agency (KCNA). Both of these sites were down when Al Jazeera attempted to access them on Saturday morning.

Almost all of the country’s internet links and traffic are believed to pass through Chinese servers.

It is not known how many people have direct access to the global internet in North Korea, but estimates place the figure at a small fraction of 1 percent of the country’s population of some 25 million.

A highly-monitored and curated intranet is offered to North Korean citizens – known as Kwangmyong – while global internet access is strictly limited in the authoritarian country.

The country has been the target of cyberattacks in the past, including in January 2022, when United States-based hacker Alejandro Caceres removed every publicly visible North Korean website and kept them down for more than a week using distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

North Korea, ruled by third-generation dictator Kim Jong Un, has been accused by US and United Nations officials of operating armies of hackers from within the country as part of an escalating campaign of global cyber theft.

In a report published in December, US blockchain analysis firm, Chainalysis, said North Korean hackers set a new record for cyber theft in 2024, stealing more than $1.34bn worth of cryptocurrency through 47 cyberattacks.