North Korea Internet Fails for Third Time in a Week
Country has been blamed for hacking Sony.
— -- North Korea faced a five-hour Internet outage Saturday, the country's third major outage in the past week.
The Internet went out in the nation around 10:42 p.m. local time and remained down for five hours, according to Dyn Research, an Internet management performance company that measures global Internet traffic.
The network had previously gone down twice in the past week, with the first outage lasting for more than nine hours on Dec. 22, and the second lasting for just over 30 minutes on Dec. 23.
Akamai Technologies, one of the world's largest cloud service providers based in Cambridge, Mass., tweeted a graph of North Korea's Internet activity showing a major disruption today.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation blamed North Korea for hacking the film company Sony and releasing sensitive information. After the hackers threatened attacks if Sony released the film "The Interview," a comedy about a fictional interview with Kim Jong-Un, some theater chains said they would not show it and the studio eventually said it would not release the movie.
The studio eventually released the film online on Dec. 24, and it opened it more than 300 theaters on Christmas Day.
President Obama previously said the U.S. would respond to the Sony hack.
After the third outage today, North Korean officials released a statement insulting the president.
"Obama always goes reckless in words and deeds like a monkey in a tropical forest," an unidentified spokesman at the commission's Policy Department said in a statement carried by the country's official Korean Central News Agency, according to The Associated Press.
In recent days some internet commentators have discussed the possibility over social media that another entity besides North Korea was actually behind the Sony hack. The FBI completely dismissed those theories in a statement today
"The FBI has concluded the Government of North Korea is responsible for the theft and destruction of data on the network of Sony Pictures Entertainment," read a portion of the statement given to ABC News. "Attribution to North Korea is based on intelligence from the FBI, the U.S. intelligence community, DHS, foreign partners and the private sector. There is no credible information to indicate that any other individual is responsible for this cyber incident."
ABC News' Mike Levine contributed to this report.