It wasn't immediately clear what caused the Internet stoppage in one of the least-wired and poorest countries in the world, but outside experts said it could be anything from a cyberattack to a simple power failure. The White House and the State Department declined to say whether the U.S. government was responsible.
Even if a cyberattack had caused the shutdown, analysts said, it would largely be symbolic since only a tiny number of North Koreans are allowed on the Internet — a fraction of Pyongyang's staunchly loyal elite, as well as foreigners.
Though it denies responsibility for the Sony hack, North Korea's government has called it a "righteous deed" and made clear its fury over Sony's film "The Interview," a comedy that depicts the assassination of the North's authoritarian leader, Kim Jong Un, the head of a 1.2 million-man army and the focus of an intense cult of personality.
U.S. computer experts described the Internet outage in the North as sweeping and progressively worse. Jim Cowie, chief scientist at Dyn Research, an Internet performance company, said in an online post that the North came back online after a 9 ½-hour outage.
Possible causes for the shutdown include an external attack on its fragile network or even just power problems.
(culled from yahoo news)The shutdown had severed one of the autocratic East Asian state’s last remaining tethers to the outside world. It is not yet clear whether there is any connection between the blackout and U.S. President Barack Obama promising, just hours earlier, a “proportional” reprisal for Pyongyang’s alleged hacking of Sony Pictures Entertainment.
This feud started with the film on the fictional killing of its leader Kim Jong-un which has been perceived by North Korea as wrong and is accusing the USA for this! North Korea has threatened unspecified attacks on the US in an escalation of a war of words following the Sony Pictures cyber-attacks.
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