Analysis: It would not have taken much to shut down internet in North Korea
Its internet connections are negligible and are considered among most vulnerable to attacks
If someone did just knock North Korea off the internet for half a day, it wouldn't have taken much.
With barely 1,000 internet addresses, one internet service provider and one connection to the outside world via China, North Korea's cyberlinks are negligible - barely one per cent of that of Afghanistan, a similarly impoverished country with a roughly comparable population.
By the same token, closing down the links wouldn't have had much of an effect within North Korea. For internal online communications it uses a closed intranet network, but that was apparently not affected, according to officials across the border in the South.
North Korea is "one of the least connected countries in the world", said Matthew Prince, CEO of US-based CloudFlare, which, among other services, protects websites against web-based attacks.
It's also one of the most vulnerable, said Jim Cowie, chief scientist at Dyn, a US-based internet performance company.
"North Korea, historically, is fairly fragile," he said after internet access to North Korea was restored on Tuesday.