State Dept. Official Does Not Deny U.S. Role in North Korea Internet Outage

State Dept. Official Does Not Deny U.S. Role in North Korea Internet Outage (Mediaite)

Following President Barack Obama’s promise of a “proportional response” to the cyber-attack on Sony Pictures, North Korea is seeing a near-total outage of its already-limited internet access. And in comments to the Associated Press, State Department spokesperson Marie Harf is not denying that the U.S. is involved.

“We aren’t going to discuss, you know, publicly operational details about the possible response options or comment on those kind of reports in anyway except to say that as we implement our responses, some will be seen, some may not be seen,” Harf said Monday, regarding the U.S. response to North Korea. The White House declined to comment on similar inquiries.

The internet outage in North Korea could have a variety of causes, though one expert, Doug Madory of Dyn Research, suggests that a “glitch” is unlikely given that it has gone on for more than a couple of hours. That organization tweeted out this graph showing the severity of the incident.