Internet service in North Korea appears to be offline.

According to Dyn Research, which assesses Internet performance issues, North Korea's national Internet has been completely offline for more than two hours after 24 hours "of increasing instability."

The firm tweeted an image that shows brief downtime and then a sustained offline period in North Korea.

The outage, of course, comes shortly after the FBI said North Korea was responsible for the recent hack of Sony Pictures, which briefly took the film studio's network offline and ultimately resulted in the release of Sony films online, as well as the personal information of employees, executives, and A-list celebrities.

A White House official told Bloomberg that it had "no new information about North Korea" today. The State Department was similarly coy when questioned by Bloomberg, saying that of the options the U.S. was considering in retaliation for the Sony hack, "some will be seen. Some may not be seen."

According to the North Korea Tech blog, Internet access in North Korea "does suffer from periodic outages, so it could be something as mundane as network maintenance or a failing router."

However, Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis at Dyn Research, told the blog that continuous connectivity problems in North Korea are usually rare, and that he "wouldn't be surprised if they are absorbing some sort of attack presently."

Madory also told the New York Times that the outage "is consistent with a DDoS attack on their routers."

During a Friday press briefing, President Obama said he had not yet made any decisions about how to respond to the Sony hack. "We just confirmed that it was North Korea," he said. "We have been working up a range of options, they will be presented to me, [and] I will make a decision based on what I think is proportional."

The Sony hack was reportedly in response to one of the studio's films, The Interview, which depicts a plot to kill Kim Jong-un. Hackers also threatened 9/11-style violence on any theater that showed the movie, prompting theaters to cancel showings and Sony to stop the movie's release altogether. Obama criticized that move, arguing that "we cannot have a society in which some dictator some place can start imposing censorship here in the U.S."

The "Internet" in North Korea is not like the Web we know. As Google's Eric Schmidt described it last year after a visit there, North Koreans can make use of a supervised Internet, which monitors everything they browse, or North Korea's Intranet, which features content that's been culled by the government itself.

For more, check out the video below and Will the Sony Hack Bring Back the BlackBerry?