Internet Service Restored in North Korea After 9 Hours

12/23/2014

SEOUL – Internet service in North Korea was restored Tuesday after webpages of state-controlled media entities were inaccessible for about nine hours, an incident that followed an announcement by the United States that it would give a proportionate response to the cyber-attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment.

According to South Korean media, major North Korean websites were intermittently down from 1:00 a.m. local time (16:00 GMT Monday), among them the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) and Rodong Sinmun, two of Pyongyang’s official media entities.

The websites of KCNA, Rodong and rest of the internet portals of the Communist regime have once more become accessible and have not suffered any more shutdowns.

Websites whose servers are located in foreign countries were not affected and continued to function normally, such as the one dealing with propaganda, Uriminzokkiri, and the Choson Sinbo daily of the North Korean community in Japan.

Though the regime has kept mum on the shutdown, South Korean media has suggested the possibility of it being a case of U.S. retaliation following the attack on Sony which U.S. authorities have blamed on North Korea.

A North Korean representative at the UN said that the internet connection in his country had been unstable during the last few hours and that it was impossible to get connected, but he did not offer an explanation as to the causes, he told South Korean daily Voice of the People in New York.

Other South Korean media indicated the possibility of a technical glitch or an internal problem in North Korea, due to the fragile nature of the connections in the country, for the incident.

The cyber-attack on the studio, in which thousands of emails and employees’ data was stolen around the end of November and beginning of December, was in apparent retaliation for “The Interview,” a movie about a plan to assassinate North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.

Sony canceled the Christmas Day release of the comedy in which Seth Rogen and James Franco play the leads, after the same group of hackers, known as Guardians of Peace, threatened terror attacks on theaters screening the movie.

The U.S. has blamed North Korea for the cyber-attack, while the North Korean regime has denied having a hand in it and accused the U.S. government of carrying out a defamation campaign against it.

source