North Korea Experienced Brief Connectivity Disruption

North Korea experienced a brief but notable disruption to its internet connectivity early on July 23. The event, which lasted just under an hour, was characterized by a significant drop in Border Gateway Protocol visibility.

Technical Details

The disruption occurred between 04:40 and 05:35 UTC. The event registered a severity score of 250, primarily driven by a degradation in the BGP signal. BGP, or Border Gateway Protocol, is the system that manages how traffic is routed between networks on the internet; a drop in this signal indicates reduced visibility of the country’s network prefixes to the global routing table. Concurrently, active probing measurements for ICMP reachability across IPv4 address blocks also showed a 50% reduction from peak levels during the event window.

The cause has not been publicly attributed.

Connectivity was reported restored by 05:35 UTC.