North Korean Websites Accessible Again, Restored After 32-Hour Outage

Widespread access disruptions across major North Korean media and institutional websites appear to have been resolved after approximately 32 hours.

A total of 42 major websites using North Korea's country code top-level domain '.kp'—including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), Minju Choson, and Naenara—have maintained stable access over an extended period from around 7 p.m. yesterday, October 21, to 5:30 p.m. on October 22.

The websites became inaccessible or unstable starting at 11 a.m. on October 20.

This disruption lasted for about eight hours until 7 p.m., and while access appeared to be briefly restored, the sites went down again around 11 p.m.

Intermittent outages continued over the following day before normal service resumed around 7 p.m. on October 21.

The exact cause of the incident has not yet been confirmed, but the possibility of a network line issue has been raised.

Security experts explained that unstable power supplies in North Korea could intermittently cause border routers or switching equipment to turn on and off, leading to such access disruptions.

In particular, servers managing North Korean websites are all routed through a single Chinese telecommunications line, creating a structure where problems in this bandwidth can cause multiple websites to go down simultaneously.

Some also suggest that a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack cannot be ruled out, noting that recurring disruptions can occur when attackers repeatedly pause and resume their strikes to evade detection.

Regarding the matter, an official from the Ministry of Unification said, "There are often cases where North Korean websites are down for about two days," adding, "There is nothing we can confirm regarding the cause."

(Photo: Capture of the Korean Central News Agency website screen, Yonhap News)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.