All of the North Korean web sites that target audiences outside of the country were in accessible Wednesday morning Korean time.
The reason isn’t clear.
Reports of a single server being inaccessible are common, but the site will often come back online within a few minutes or hours. It’s presumed those single outages are usually for maintenance or a reboot of the computer on which the site runs.
This time the outage is more widespread.
The small handful of web servers in North Korea is connected to the rest of the world via two links: a main link through China Unicom and a satellite backup via Intelsat.
The Internet connection to the country appears to still be operating — at least one server inside North Korea did respond to attempts to connect.
There’s nothing to point to an issue other than something technical. Other North Korean media output, including domestic and international radio broadcasts and the KCNA wire service, are operating as normal.