# North Korea’s Websites Went Dark for 32 Hours; Network Analysts Point to DDoS Traffic

- Link: https://tectonicsmediapublications.com/north-korea-internet-outages-ddos-kentik-october-2026/
- Published: 2026-10-24T01:23:27+00:00
- Author: News Team

**SEOUL, October 24, 2026** — A wave of abnormal internet traffic appears to have
contributed to widespread disruptions of North Korean websites this week, according
to a network-monitoring analysis reported Friday. The finding offers a possible 
explanation for outages that left state-run websites intermittently unreachable 
for roughly 32 hours, but investigators have not identified who was responsible.

Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at U.S. network-monitoring company Kentik,
told [Reuters on October 23](https://www.reuters.com/world/china/north-korean-internet-was-hit-by-ddos-cyberattack-network-monitoring-firm-says-2026-10-23/)
that several waves of incoming traffic coincided with outages beginning around 11
a.m. local time on October 20. The traffic pattern was consistent with a distributed
denial-of-service, or DDoS, attack — an attempt to overwhelm online services with
requests.

More than 40 websites using North Korea’s `.kp` domain were affected, according 
to South Korean reporting cited by Reuters. The affected services reportedly included
the foreign ministry’s website and the Korean Central News Agency, the state news
organization.

## What is known — and what is not

Kentik observed traffic originating from networks in several countries, including
Vietnam, the Philippines and Venezuela. Those locations do **not** establish who
directed the traffic. Madory also cautioned that Kentik examined only part of the
traffic heading toward North Korea, leaving the attack’s full scale uncertain.

The interruptions themselves were documented before the DDoS assessment emerged.
On October 21, specialist publication [NK News reported](https://www.nknews.org/pro/nearly-all-north-korean-websites-go-offline-in-mysterious-outage/)
that virtually all North Korean websites had become intermittently inaccessible,
including multiple state-media outlets. Earlier speculation included infrastructure
or power-supply problems. The later traffic analysis strengthens the case for an
attack but does not independently rule out every other contributing fault.

The episode underscores the vulnerability of a relatively small, centralized set
of publicly reachable online services. A disruption to the network infrastructure
used by many government websites can have an outsized effect on information flowing
out of the country.

As of the October 23 reporting, there was no verified public attribution of the 
suspected attack to any government, organization or individual.

_Featured image: Archival photograph of the Pyongyang skyline taken April 30, 2010.
It does not depict the October 2026 outage. Photo: John Pavelka / [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pyongyang_skyline_at_night.jpg),
[CC BY 2.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/). Image resized automatically
for responsive display._

**Reporting sources:** [Reuters (Oct. 23)](https://www.reuters.com/world/china/north-korean-internet-was-hit-by-ddos-cyberattack-network-monitoring-firm-says-2026-10-23/);
[NK News (Oct. 21)](https://www.nknews.org/pro/nearly-all-north-korean-websites-go-offline-in-mysterious-outage/).

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