Nearly all North Korean websites go offline for over 24 hours

There has been no outside access to North Korean state media and official portals as nearly all of the country's websites have been offline for over 24 hours, Seoul-based website NK News reported Wednesday.

While the cause of the nationwide outage remains unclear, the disruptions appear to be linked to issues in North Korea's "Ryugyong-dong" network, which has historically relied on internet service supplied by Chinese provider China Unicom via IP addresses associated with Hong Kong-based network Cenbong.

Multiple websites began experiencing persistent outages simultaneously on Tuesday, including the state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), the Rodong Sinmun and Minju Joson newspapers, and external radio service Voice of Korea.

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

DPRK refers to North Korea's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

KCNA came back online later Tuesday but was offline for 19 of the 24 hours following the initial outage.

The other sites largely remained offline throughout, apart from brief periods of connectivity on Wednesday morning totaling approximately 10 minutes.

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 also served as an alternative internet service provider since 2017, while both Chinese and Russian services have routed traffic to a secondary Philippines-based network supplementing Ryugyong-dong since 2023.

However, internet connectivity has remained at a standstill for over a day despite these alternative routing pathways.