A South Korean watchtower is seen at the border with North Korea, divided by the Imjin River in Paju, north of Seoul, on Thursday. (Yonhap-AFP)
A South Korean watchtower is seen at the border with North Korea, divided by the Imjin River in Paju, north of Seoul, on Thursday. (Yonhap-AFP)

Websites of some major North Korean organs, including those of state media outlets and the foreign ministry, were temporarily inaccessible en masse Saturday morning for an unknown reason.

There were failures in connecting to North Korean websites in the morning, including the official Korean Central News Agency, the Rodong Sinmun newspaper, the foreign ministry and the Air Koryo national air carrier.

Connections had later been made available as of 3:50 p.m. following several hours of unstable connection.

The exact cause for the access failure was not immediately confirmed. Access to those websites sometimes suffered setbacks in the past.

In January 2022, the North's major websites reportedly suffered a similar outage due to a suspected distributed denial-of-service attack. At that time, the North's internet went down for about six hours. (Yonhap)