North Korea Internet Fails for Third Time in a Week

Published at 2:57 pm, December 27, 2014

EastIdahoNews.com Staff

iStock/Thinkstock(PYONGYANG, North Korea) — North Korea faced a five-hour Internet outage Saturday, the country’s third major outage in the past week.

The Internet went out in the nation around 10:42 p.m. local time and remained down for five hours, according to Dyn Research, an Internet management performance company that measures global Internet traffic.

The network had previously gone down twice in the past week, with the first outage lasting for more than nine hours on Dec. 22, and the second lasting for just over 30 minutes on Dec. 23.

Off-again, on-again: North Korea returns after > 5 hour national outage. pic.twitter.com/aWw7ffMU92

— Dyn Research (@DynResearch) December 27, 2014

Akamai Technologies, one of the world’s largest cloud service providers based in Cambridge, Mass., tweeted a graph of North Korea’s Internet activity showing a major disruption Saturday.

.@Akamai traffic to the country drops to zero as North Korea #Internet sees multi-hour outage on December 27: pic.twitter.com/c51p6cloLa

— StateOfTheInternet (@akamai_soti) December 27, 2014

The Federal Bureau of Investigation blamed North Korea for hacking the film company Sony and releasing sensitive information. After the hackers threatened attacks if Sony released the film The Interview, a comedy about a fictional interview with Kim Jong-Un, some theater chains said they would not show it and the studio eventually said it would not release the movie.

The studio eventually released the film online on Dec. 24, and it opened it more than 300 theaters on Christmas Day.

In recent days some internet commentators have discussed the possibility over social media that another entity besides North Korea was actually behind the Sony hack. The FBI completely dismissed those theories in a statement Saturday.

“The FBI has concluded the Government of North Korea is responsible for the theft and destruction of data on the network of Sony Pictures Entertainment,” read a portion of the statement given to ABC News. “Attribution to North Korea is based on intelligence from the FBI, the U.S. intelligence community, DHS, foreign partners and the private sector. There is no credible information to indicate that any other individual is responsible for this cyber incident.”

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