BUFFERING

North Korean Internet Goes Down

Kim Jong Un: “Wartime state.”

North Korea’s Internet went down twice in the past 12 hours as Pyongyang talks about going to war with South Korea. Dyn Research reported the Internet outages, but it is not clear whether they were intentional or not. Kim Jong Un on Friday ordered troops to enter a “wartime state” and warned the South to stop broadcasting into the North from loudspeakers at the border. The two countries exchanged artillery fire on Thursday, which followed two South Korean soldiers being injured by a landmine in the demilitarized zone.

This isn’t the first time North Korea has lost its tenuous connection to the global Internet. As The Daily Beast previously reported, a variety of hackers—some working for the United States government, others operating independently—attacked and probed key portions of the North Korean Internet after the country's hackers targeted Sony Pictures Entertainment last year. Since then, North Korea has gone offline twice, according to Dyn. In May, the Internet went down for more than an hour. And on August 9, the country suffered a 4.5-hour outage.

— Shane Harris

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