North Korea’s connection to the internet was severed for nearly nine hours Saturday morning, cutting the country off from the wider web, delaying official party news and disconnecting email servers.

Cyber researcher Junade Ali said Pyongyang was “wiped off the face of the internet” in a “major” outage that hit the country between 2 and 3 a.m. KST. While the cause of the issue is still unknown, North Korea’s Domain Name System (DNS) servers were disconnected, sending the entire internet infrastructure haywire. 

Ali noted that it’s hard to be certain if the incident was intentional or accidental, but suggested that