A second day of website outages curtailed access to North Korean state news and government information from abroad Oct. 21, with Yonhap News Agency counting 42 major .kp sites affected.
Telecom Observer recorded eight periods of instability in North Korea’s internet routing between 4:40 and 10:30 p.m. ET on Oct. 20. It said no cause had been publicly attributed.
At 4 a.m. ET (08:00 UTC) on Oct. 21, the 42 sites were inaccessible or unstable, Yonhap reported. They included sites for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), Minju Joson and Naenara.
NK News reported that the disruptions began Oct. 20 and also affected Rodong Sinmun, Voice of Korea and Air Koryo. Pingdom monitoring data cited by NK News showed KCNA was offline for 19 of the first 24 hours after the disruptions began. Some sites were briefly accessible during that period.
Yonhap cited earlier North Korean internet outages in 2014 and 2022. North Korean authorities had not publicly addressed the latest disruptions as of the agency’s Oct. 21 report.
