Mysterious web outage in North Korea now over

Editor's note: This is breaking news. This story has been updated from previous versions.

GlobalPost's senior correspondent in Seoul, Geoffrey Cain, reported an apparent web blackout in Pyongyang that began Wednesday morning, local time, and lasted until Wednesday evening.

Cain reported that the outage could be due to "routine maintenance," as noted by NKNews and the North Korea Tech blog.

The reason for the earlier outage, however, is still unknown. North Korea Tech had described the outages as being more widespread than is normal — in other words, affecting more than one server.

Wednesday morning local time, the blog wrote that it was impossible to access "all of the North Korean web sites that target audiences outside of the country." State media and other outlets were operating normally.

North Korea Tech added:

"The small handful of web servers in North Korea is connected to the rest of the world via two links: a main link through China Unicom and a satellite backup via Intelsat.

"The Internet connection to the country appears to still be operating — at least one server inside North Korea did respond to attempts to connect."