Trucks travel across the Yalu River on the Friendship Bridge from North Korea to Dandong, China's larger border city with North Korea, in Liaoning Province, on May 27. North Korean websites hosted on China servers have experienced outages for two consecutive days. Photo by Stephen Shaver/UPI | License Photo

SEOUL, June 4 (UPI) -- An Internet outage has affected North Korean websites hosted on Chinese servers.

South Korean news agency Yonhap reported the websites Uriminzokkiri, Our Nation School and DPRK Today have been experiencing blackouts since June 3.


Our Nation School is a website that operates from a server based in Shenyang, China, under the supervision of Kim Il Sung Broadcasting University.

Shenyang is a city in northeast China, located 155 miles from the North Korea border.

North Korean websites that were in operation included Rodong Sinmun and KCNA – both websites, however, are hosted from servers inside North Korea, South Korean news network YTN reported.

Other pro-Pyongyang websites hosted on Japanese servers continued to be available online.

The cause of the website errors has not been verified.

This is not the first time North Korean websites have experienced outages.

North Korea's Internet came under cyberattack last December, and thousands of computers were unable to function.

The outage took place not long after the Obama administration named the North Korean leadership as the leading suspect behind the hacking of Sony Pictures.

In March, Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee said the December attack on North Korean Internet was payback for the Sony hack, but the U.S. official declined to identify the agency responsible for the retaliation.