North Korea experienced a sweeping blackout to its internet service on Monday (November 22, 2014) with some experts suggesting the nation's access went "totally down" at one stage. The White House has declined to comment on whether the US government was responsible amid the international furore over the release of comedy movie The Interview, starring Seth Rogen and James Franco.

North KoreaSeth Rogen and James Franco star in 'The Interview'

By Tuesday, North Korea appeared to be back online, though it was a strange outage given the country's apparent involvement in the recent Sony hack. 

Internet technology company Arbor Networks, which protects companies against hacking, said its monitoring detected denial-of-service attacks aimed at North Korea's infrastructure starting on Saturday and continuing until Monday. According to the Guardian, these style of attacks tie up a target's internet equipment so that it becomes overwhelmed.

More: at the behest of North Korea, Sony cancels release of The Interview

Given North Korea's relatively limited internet service, it would be easy to achieve such an attack and it is more likely that a group of hacktivists are behind the down time, said Dan Holden, director of security research at Arbor.

"Anyone of us that upset because we couldn't watch the movie, you could do that. Their internet is just not that sophisticated."

On Friday, U.S President Barack Obama said the U.S would respond to the hacking of Sony Pictures which he described as an expensive piece of "cyber vandalism". 

"We aren't going to discuss, you know, publically operationally details about the possible response options or comment on those kind of reports in any way except to say that as we implement our responses, some will be seen, some may not be seen," said state department spokeswoman Marie Harf. 

North Korea forcefully maintains it was not behind the leak at Sony, which led to numerous unreleased movies hitting the web, as well as hundreds of thousands of emails between its top executives. 

More: Texas theater to show Team America: World Police instead of The Interview