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| Version 0 | Version 1 |
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| North Korea suffers internet blackout – reports | North Korea suffers internet blackout – reports |
| (about 7 hours later) | |
| North Korea experienced sweeping and progressively worse internet outages extending into Monday, with one computer expert saying the country’s online access went “totally down”. The White House and the State Department declined to say whether the US government was responsible. | |
| By Tuesdsay the US-based internet monitoring company Dyn said the country appeared to be back online. But “the question is whether it will return to the unstable fluctuations we saw before the outage” said Dyn spokesman Jim Cowie. | |
| President Barack Obama said on Friday the US government expected to respond to the hacking of Sony Pictures Entertainment, which he described as an expensive act of “cyber vandalism” that he blamed on North Korea. Obama did not say how the US might respond, and it was not immediately clear if the internet connectivity problems represented the retribution. The US government regards its offensive cyber operations as highly classified. | President Barack Obama said on Friday the US government expected to respond to the hacking of Sony Pictures Entertainment, which he described as an expensive act of “cyber vandalism” that he blamed on North Korea. Obama did not say how the US might respond, and it was not immediately clear if the internet connectivity problems represented the retribution. The US government regards its offensive cyber operations as highly classified. |
| “We aren’t going to discuss, you know, publicly operational details about the possible response options or comment on those kind of reports in any way except to say that as we implement our responses, some will be seen, some may not be seen,” State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said. | “We aren’t going to discuss, you know, publicly operational details about the possible response options or comment on those kind of reports in any way except to say that as we implement our responses, some will be seen, some may not be seen,” State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said. |
| North Korea has forcefully denied it was responsible for hacking into Sony. | North Korea has forcefully denied it was responsible for hacking into Sony. |
| Doug Madory, the director of internet analysis at Dyn, said the problems were discovered over the weekend and grew progressively worse until North Korea went “totally down”. | |
| He said one benign explanation for the problem was that a router suffered a software glitch, though a cyber-attack involving North Korea’s internet service was also a possibility. | He said one benign explanation for the problem was that a router suffered a software glitch, though a cyber-attack involving North Korea’s internet service was also a possibility. |
| Routing instabilities are not uncommon but this particular outage was prolonged and got worse instead of better over the hours, Madory said. | |
| “This doesn’t fit that profile,” of an ordinary routing problem, he said. “This shows something getting progressively worse over time.” | “This doesn’t fit that profile,” of an ordinary routing problem, he said. “This shows something getting progressively worse over time.” |