On Saturday (June 7th), there was a sudden large-scale disruption in the North Korean internet, which lasted for several hours. This disruption caused a halt in the online connections to government websites and official news services, cutting off the country from the internet world.
According to reports from Reuters, the specific cause of this outage is still unclear at this time. However, researchers monitoring North Korea’s internet and technical infrastructure suggest that this may have been caused by internal factors rather than a cyber-attack, as connections through China and Russia were also affected.
On June 7th, major official North Korean news services, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and websites like Koryo Airlines were inaccessible. However, these sites began to gradually come back online around noon.
Junade Ali, a British researcher monitoring North Korea’s internet, previously stated that the entire internet infrastructure of North Korea was not showing up on systems monitoring internet activities, and email services were also affected. He mentioned, “It is difficult to determine whether this was accidental or intentional, but it seems that internal issues caused the disruption rather than an external attack.”
Martyn Williams, an expert at the Stimson Center specializing in studying North Korean technology and infrastructure, also noted that the inability to use connections with China and Russia suggests that this internet shutdown was likely due to internal issues in North Korea.
North Korea has one of the most tightly controlled internet systems globally, restricting access to any form of online communication. Ordinary citizens can only access the government’s intranet, which is not connected to the broader global internet.
Only a few elites within the North Korean government and leadership have permission to access the internet, and government and news websites often disseminate propaganda content to external audiences.
In recent years, North Korea has experienced multiple large-scale internet outages suspected to have been caused by cyber-attacks.
The country possesses hacker groups, including one known as “Lazarus” controlled by government intelligence agencies. This organization has been accused of launching cyber-attacks against foreign institutions and businesses and more recently has been implicated in cryptocurrency theft and money laundering activities.