Nearly all North Korean websites offline for more than 24 hours

Nearly all North Korean websites have been offline for more than 24 hours, preventing access from outside the country to state media and official portals, Seoul-based NK News reported on Wednesday, according to Anadolu Agency.

The cause of the nationwide outage remains unclear. The disruptions appear to be linked to problems with North Korea’s “Ryugyong-dong” network, which has historically relied on internet service provided by Chinese company “China Unicom” through IP addresses associated with Hong Kong-based network “Cenbong”.

Several websites began experiencing persistent outages at the same time on Tuesday. They included the state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), the Rodong Sinmun and Minju Joson newspapers, and the external radio service Voice of Korea.

The official information portal Naenara, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs website, national airline “Air Koryo” and the DPRK Portal, which lists official North Korean websites, have also been down since Tuesday.

DPRK is the abbreviation of North Korea’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

KCNA returned online later on Tuesday but was offline for 19 of the 24 hours after the initial outage. The other sites were largely unreachable throughout the period, except for brief periods of connectivity on Wednesday morning that lasted about 10 minutes in total.

Pyongyang’s Silibank SMTP email server has also been offline since Tuesday morning, apart from a five-minute period of connectivity on Wednesday morning.

Russian telecommunications company “TransTeleCom” has served as an alternative internet service provider since 2017. Since 2023, Chinese and Russian services have also routed traffic to a secondary network based in the Philippines, supplementing “Ryugyong-dong”.

Despite these alternative routing pathways, internet connectivity has remained at a standstill for more than a day.