North Korea’s websites go dark as Kim Jong-un death rumor fuels speculation

North Korea’s internet has gone dark for a second straight day, with state media, government portals and even Air Koryo’s website knocked offline at the same time.

A rumor that North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un had died briefly fueled speculation that hackers or a surge in global traffic may have overwhelmed North Korean websites. But the scale of the disruption points more strongly to a broader network failure.

U.S.-based North Korea specialist outlet NK News reported on Wednesday that North Korean media websites were inaccessible worldwide.

The disruption began at around 11 a.m. Tuesday. Websites run by North’s state media Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), the Rodong Sinmun and Minju Choson all went offline, along with the website of external radio broadcaster Voice of Korea.

Other major North Korean websites also went down at around the same time. Those included the official information portal Naenara, the North’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, state airline Air Koryo and the official DPRK Portal, which provides a directory of North Korean websites.

The KCNA website briefly came back online on Tuesday. Even so, the site remained inaccessible for about 19 of the first 24 hours after the outage began.

Most of the other websites remain largely inaccessible. Their total uptime on the morning of Wednesday amounted to only about 10 minutes.

North Korea’s technology company Sili Bank’s SMTP email server also stopped working at around 11 a.m. on Tuesday. Apart from a roughly five-minute window on the morning of Wednesday, the server remained down.

The outage appears to be tied to problems with North Korea’s so-called Ryugyong-dong network. The network has long depended on internet access provided by Chinese provider China Unicom through IP addresses linked to Hong Kong-based network Cenbong.

“North Korea has an unstable power supply, so border routers or switching equipment can lose power intermittently and produce this kind of pattern,” Park Chan-am, CEO of South Korean cybersecurity firm Stealien, said in an interview with Yonhap News Agency. “North Korea’s internet outage last June was also assessed as an internal problem rather than an external attack.”

Some observers have suggested that a false rumor about Kim’s death may have driven more people to North Korean media websites in search of confirmation, which could have led to the server outage.

That explanation appears less likely, however, because the disruption has affected nearly all North Korean websites, not just news outlets.

Other theories include a large-scale cyberattack or major maintenance work on North Korea’s internet infrastructure.

So far, however, no evidence has emerged to show that an external attack caused the outage.

BY SHIN HYE-YEON [[email protected]]