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North Korea's Internet is offline

Questions remain if the U.S. government is responsible.

By Ed Adamczyk

WASHINGTON, Dec. 22 (UPI) -- North Korea's limited Internet went offline Monday, with outages reported in the four networks connecting the country to the World Wide Web.

After a weekend of spotty coverage, North Korea lost its connection early Monday.

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The connectivity issues emerged two days after U.S. President Barack Obama said the united States would "respond proportionally, and in a place, time and manner we choose" to the alleged cyberattack on Sony Pictures Entertainment. White House National Security spokeswoman Bernadette Meehan offered no information on the incident.

It is possible North Korea's Internet access simply crashed on its own due to poor maintenance, or that the government shut it down unilaterally, as Syria's has done in the past, to prevent those with Internet access to gain international perspective on the hacking attack.

"The situation now is they are totally offline. This isn't normal for them. Usually they are up solid. It is kind of out of the ordinary. This is not like anything I've seen before," Doug Maddry of Dyn Research, Inc., of Torrance, Calif., told Bloomberg News, the website Engadget reported.

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Since the United States has turned to China to pressure North Korea, it is also conceivable China's supplier of North Korea's Internet, China Unicom, closed access, or an outside group, hackers or a foreign government, has overloaded North Korea's broadband traffic.

The few North Koreans with Internet access are currently without it, a possible proportional rejoinder to what Obama termed "cybervandalism" in describing the disruption to Sony.

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