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Olympic Organizers Investigating Possible Cyberattack

Unexplained technical issues caused a major outage ahead of Friday’s opening ceremony.

Organizers of the Pyeonchang Winter Olympics say they are investigating a possible attack on their internet and Wi-Fi systems that triggered an outage ahead of the opening ceremony Friday. Nancy Park, a spokeswoman for the organizing committee, stopped short of describing the incident as a cyberattack and gave no details on the cause of the disruption. “It didn't affect the opening ceremony,” she was quoted as saying by the Associated Press. “It went as planned. We just had some issue with our internal system,” she said. The Pyeongchang Olympic website also reportedly suffered problems as a result of the disruption, leaving some people unable to print out tickets to Olympic events. Experts had warned of increased cybersecurity threats at the games, particularly from North Korea, which has been blamed for last year’s devastating WannaCry cyberattack.