North Korea Blames U.S. For Internet Blackouts

North Korea blamed the U.S. for the internet blackouts that have occurred over the past few days.

China's official Xinhua news agency reported that North Korea has experienced internet disruptions and instability with their networks, according to NBC News.

On Saturday, North Korea experienced another countrywide online blackout, but this one differed from the previous one.

The first internet blackout had hours of routing instability, while the most recent incident did not.

Furthermore, North Korea's 3G mobile phone networks have also been paralyzed, USA Today reported.

As of 9:30 p.m. local time (7:30 a.m. ET), the internet and mobile service had not returned.

Although North Korea blamed the U.S., the U.S. government has not taken responsibility for the outages.

President Obama promised retaliation against North Korea for the Sony Pictures hackings, but did not specify as to what the action would be.

The outages come after the North Korean government compared Obama to a "monkey" for how he blamed North Korea for the Sony attacks.

However, NBC News reported that China could be behind the North Korean outages because much of their internet traffic passes through Chinese routers.

Many North Koreans do not have access to the internet, and approximately 1.7 million of the 25 million people have cellphones, according to USA Today.

Tags
North korea, Internet, U.S., Obama, Monkey
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