North Korea’s Internet Goes Dark: A Glimpse into the Hermit Kingdom’s Digital Isolation
Imagine your entire country’s internet infrastructure simply… vanishing. For nearly nine hours on Saturday, June 7, 2025, that’s precisely what happened to North Korea. All internet routes, including those notoriously tight-lipped connections through China and Russia, seemingly winked out of existence, leaving the Hermit Kingdom digitally isolated from the rest of the world.
The news broke thanks to eagle-eyed cyber researchers like Junade Ali, a UK-based expert who consistently monitors North Korean internet activity. His report painted a stark picture: “wiped off the face of the internet” was the rather dramatic, yet apparently accurate, assessment. Major North Korean websites, from the Foreign Ministry to state news agencies, became inaccessible. Even email services, a crucial lifeline for communication, were reportedly affected.
This wasn’t a brief hiccup. The outage stretched for hours, a significant period in the fast-paced digital age. While some sites flickered back to life briefly in the early morning, stability only returned much later in the day, around 11:30 a.m. KST.
So, what caused this digital blackout? In a world increasingly prone to cyber warfare and sophisticated attacks, the immediate thought might leap to an external assault. However, the consensus among experts, including Ali and Martyn Williams, a leading authority on North Korea’s technology, leans towards a different conclusion: an internal issue.
This might seem counterintuitive. If it’s internal, why such a widespread outage? The key lies in the fact that connections through both China and Russia were affected. An external cyberattack would typically target one primary entry point, not simultaneously disrupt multiple, geographically diverse routes. This points to a more fundamental problem within North Korea’s own, notoriously fragile and limited, internet infrastructure.
For those of us accustomed to robust, redundant internet systems, it’s a stark reminder of North Korea’s unique digital landscape. Unlike most nations, only a select, privileged elite in North Korea has access to the global internet. The vast majority of its citizens are confined to a government-controlled intranet, a curated and highly restricted digital space.
While this particular outage was notable for its duration and complete nature, it’s not entirely unprecedented. North Korea has experienced similar, albeit often shorter, internet disruptions in the past. We’ve seen similar blackouts in April and June of last year, each lasting several hours. These recurring incidents highlight the inherent vulnerabilities and limited resilience of their centralized and tightly controlled network.
The North Korean internet outage serves as a fascinating case study in digital isolation. It underscores the unique challenges and fragilities of a nation so tightly controlled, even in its digital sphere. While the world speculates and analyzes from afar, for those within North Korea who rely on this limited digital access, Saturday’s blackout was a stark reminder of their profound connection, or rather, disconnection, from the global digital pulse.
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