North Korea Suffers Major Internet Blackout

In a rare and sweeping disruption, North Korea’s already isolated internet presence was plunged into darkness for several hours on Saturday, severing the secretive nation from the global web. Government-run websites, state news outlets, and even the national airline’s online presence went offline in a widespread outage that researchers believe was likely due to internal issues — not a foreign cyberattack.

The blackout, which rendered key state services like the Foreign Ministry’s site and Air Koryo’s homepage unreachable, began in the early hours and persisted for several hours before connections slowly trickled back to life around midday, according to monitoring data reviewed by Reuters.

While large-scale outages affecting North Korea’s limited internet infrastructure aren’t entirely unheard of, this incident quickly caught the attention of cyber watchers and geopolitical analysts alike, given the country’s notoriously tight digital controls and history of both suffering and orchestrating cyberattacks.

“It’s hard to say whether this was intentional or accidental,” noted Junade Ali, a U.K.-based cybersecurity researcher who routinely monitors North Korea’s internet activity. “But the evidence suggests this was more likely a technical or internal issue rather than the result of an external attack.”

Ali pointed out that connections passing through both Chinese and Russian nodes — crucial for North Korea’s limited global internet access — were also impacted during the outage. This adds weight to the theory that the blackout originated from within the country’s own infrastructure rather than from a coordinated external cyber operation.

Officials from South Korea’s cyber terror response center, a division tasked with monitoring Pyongyang’s digital activities, declined to comment on the incident when contacted by reporters.

Martyn Williams, a veteran analyst focusing on North Korean technology at the Washington-based Stimson Center, also emphasized that the disruption seemed internal. “Given that both Chinese and Russian links were down, this points to something happening on the North Korean side,” Williams said.

A Fragile Digital Lifeline

North Korea’s internet, one of the most tightly controlled in the world, operates in a digital bubble. The general population has no access to the global internet and can only use a heavily restricted, government-run intranet system known as Kwangmyong, which connects select state-run websites, academic resources, and propaganda services — all isolated from the rest of the world.

Only a select group of high-ranking officials, elite technocrats, and cybersecurity operatives have unrestricted access to the open internet. Even then, the infrastructure is minimal, with estimates suggesting fewer than 50 globally accessible IP addresses are registered to the entire country.

The state uses its internet presence primarily for international propaganda purposes, running official websites and news portals like KCNA (Korean Central News Agency) aimed at foreign audiences.

A History of Digital Shadows

While this latest outage appears self-inflicted or accidental, North Korea’s cyber history is far from passive. The country operates elite hacker units, including the notorious Lazarus Group, accused of launching high-profile attacks against international banks, governments, corporations, and cryptocurrency platforms.

Notably, Lazarus has been blamed for some of the most damaging cyberattacks of the past decade, including the 2014 Sony Pictures hack, the WannaCry ransomware attack in 2017, and a string of cryptocurrency heists reportedly used to fund the regime’s weapons programs.

Despite mounting evidence from cybersecurity firms and intelligence agencies, Pyongyang consistently denies any involvement in hacking, cybercrime, or cryptocurrency theft.

A Curious Footnote

Interestingly, while this outage attracted attention for its scale, it’s not entirely unprecedented. North Korea experienced a similar widespread blackout in early 2022, believed at the time to be linked to technical failures. Some experts have speculated that the country’s aging and fragile infrastructure — combined with a lack of skilled technical personnel and equipment due to international sanctions — makes these outages increasingly likely.

Moreover, recent sanctions targeting North Korean IT workers employed abroad under false identities could be further straining the country’s technical capabilities, both domestically and overseas.

In a digital age where cyberwarfare and espionage play increasingly strategic roles, North Korea’s latest blackout serves as a stark reminder of both its limited yet dangerous cyber presence and the fragility of the infrastructure that sustains it.

As with most events inside the secretive state, the exact cause of this weekend’s blackout may never be publicly confirmed — but it certainly won’t be the last time North Korea makes headlines in cyberspace.