Up and Down: US Coy About North Korea’s Internet Woes

North Korea's Internet Briefly Down Twice Tuesday

So far nothing has compared to the 9+ hour Internet outage North Korea experienced on Monday, but the country has lost its connections twice today as well, including about a half hour stretch this morning.

There is considerable speculation that the Internet outages are US ‘retaliation’ for the Sony hack, though the US is making a big point of refusing to comment on the matter one way or another.

Experts said the Monday downing appeared to be a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, though it is unclear if today’s are related or simply more fallout from the damage done by the first one.

North Korea’s Internet access is almost non-existent to begin with, essentially 1024 IP addresses routed through China’s Unicom. North Korea’s state media uses foreign servers, which appear not to be effected.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.