New outage experienced by North Korea during the weekend

Dec 29, 2014 08:13 GMT  ·  By
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un called Barack Obama a “monkey” for getting involved in the Sony case
   North Korean leader Kim Jong-un called Barack Obama a “monkey” for getting involved in the Sony case

North Korea's network connection was brought down during the weekend for the second time in only 7 days, and local authorities are once again blaming the United States for the outage.

According to a report by Chinese news agency Xinhua, North Korea's broadband and mobile 3G networks went dark on Saturday at 7:30 am and stayed down for nearly 2 hours due to what some people called a new wave of attacks launched by the United States.

While there's no information as to where the attacks actually came from, North Korean experts believe that this second downtime was caused by the United States following the dispute between the two states regarding “The Interview” and the hack attacks against Sony.

A group of North Korean hackers threatened Sony and the United States with terrorist attacks in cinemas in case “The Interview,” a movie in which North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is assassinated with support offered by the CIA, made its premiere on Christmas day.

After Sony decided to cancel the movie launch, US President Barack Obama warned that his country would respond to cyber-attacks launched by North Korea. Eventually, Sony decided to make “The Interview” available online on YouTube, Xbox Live, and other video platforms with a small fee.

North Korea vs. the United States

The first Internet outage was experienced by North Korea last weekend, and soon after that, Pyongyang leaders stepped in and publicly accused the United States of cyber-attacks that brought down most of the services in the country.

The United States, on the other hand, denied involvement in these attacks, even though sources more or less close to the matter explained that both the US and China worked to knock the Internet down in North Korea.

At this point, the Internet connection appears to be up again in North Korea, but it remains to be seen if Pyongyang authorities have any proof that the United States was involved in these attacks.