The U.S. military’s computer network in South Korea is almost back online after an outage that hit both Seoul and the area near the North Korea border, Stars and Stripes reported on Wednesday.

The network is at 90 percent functionality after repair efforts by the 1st Signal Brigade, an 8th Army spokeswoman today Army Times on Thursday.

“However, this isolated service interruption was to our lowest priority unclassified network but had no impact on USFK or 8th Army’s combat readiness or warfighting capabilities,” Col. Kimeisha McCullum said.

Technical upgrades to the system caused the outage she said, rather than any sort of foreign hacking attempt.

US short of options to punish North Korea for serious cyberattack

The Trump administration vowed Tuesday that North Korea would be held accountable for a May cyberattack that affected 150 countries, but it didn’t say how, highlighting the difficulty of punishing a pariah nation already sanctioned to the hilt for its nuclear weapons program.

Matthew Pennington, The Associated Press and Ken Thomas, The Associated Press

December 19, 2017

“Users that required network access related to military operations during this equipment upgrade period had access to contingency alternatives,” McCullum said.

A source, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told Stripes that the outage started about two weeks ago, spending a full six days offline.

“Investments to modernize and improve our well-defended networks will continue,” McCullum said.

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