North Korea's Internet Is Down Again

North Korea's access to the internet has gone down again, hours after it recovered from a serious outage that wiped out the country's limited connection.

New Hampshire-based company Dyn Research, which reported the first outage on Monday tweeted this afternoon that North Korea's internet access has collapsed for the second time at 3:41 UTC. 

Here's the chart they posted. The purple boxes, representing North Korea's available networks, suddenly disappear at that time. 

Dyn Research has been tracking North Korea's internet access since it started seeing connection problems on Sunday evening. On Monday that problem got worse, and the country began having serious internet problems. 

The problem seemed to have been solved Monday night though, and it was reported that internet was partially restored. Well, until now. 

There are only a handful of people within North Korea affected by these outages. Only administration officials and some rich residents are able to use the internet. 

Here's a photo of North Korea taken at night in 2013. Notice how the region is totally dark? That's because so few homes in the country have access to electricity. 

It's been widely speculated that the outage is due to a cyberattack on the country. North Korea was recently named by the US government as the country behind a massive hack of Sony Pictures, which forced the movie studio to cancel the release of comedy movie 'The Interview.'

Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis at Dyn Research, said: "I haven't seen such a steady beat of routing instability and outages in KP before. Usually there are isolated blips, not continuous connectivity problems. I wouldn't be surprised if they are absorbing some sort of attack presently." He went on to say that "They have left the global Internet and they are gone until they come back."