The hermit nation continued to have problems with its national Internet connectivity on Tuesday, though the downtime lasted minutes this time instead of hours.

On Monday, North Korea's Internet service, meager as it already was, completely went dark for nearly 10 hours. Tuesday morning, after getting the Internet working again, the hermetic nation lost connectivity for 31 minutes, according to Internet traffic tracking company Dyn Research, via USA Today.

This week's Internet outage in North Korea occurred as tensions continued to grow between the U.S. and the isolated dictatorship -- on which the U.S. government has officially pinned the blame for the Sony Pictures hacking and ransom scheme that eventually coerced the delayed release of the comedy movie "The Interview" with threats of physical violence in theaters and promises of more cyber theft to come.

However, though President Obama promised a proportional response to what may be the first major act of cyberterrorism on primarily the U.S. and the English-speaking world (though that label itself is controversial and hotly debated), U.S. officials denied the U.S. was behind the Monday outage, according to Reuters, and a senior official told The Wall Street Journal Monday the debate over how to respond to North Korea appeared to be continuing, which suggests that the U.S. had no involvement in either outage.

Those denials are further strengthened by experts, like digital security company CloudFlare's CEO Matthew Prince, who told Reuters that the relative lack of severity likely rules out a U.S. government-based cyber counterattack.

The mere fact that North Korea could re-establish its Internet connection within hours "is pretty good evidence that the outage wasn't caused by a state-sponsored attack, otherwise it'd likely still be down for the count," Prince told Reuters.

The question of how North Korea's Internet outage occurred -- and why it followed so closely behind the U.S.'s official statement -- is still unknown.

Some have suggested the Internet outage was a punitive measure from the only country that North Korea has major ties with and depends on for digital connectivity to the rest of the world, China.

North Korea's only known Internet connection runs through the China United Network Communications Group Co. But the Foreign Ministry of China has denounced that speculation as "extremely irresponsible, unprofessional and misleading," according to the BBC.

The fact that North Korea is so restrictive with its citizens' and its own communications with the outside world makes the situation even more murky and difficult to decipher.

But the fact that North Korea is so closed and, in many respects, decades behind the rest of the world also points to the likelihood that its Internet outage was a result of faulty old hardware, technological ignorance or a combination of both.

The outage could also be the act of a single, dedicated individual, according to Dyn Research. Because the outside Internet for all of North Korea's select elite who are allowed to access it runs through one single known connection, it's extremely vulnerable to attack. As Dyn Research's chief scientist James Cowie told the BBC such an attack "would not take a tremendous effort to carry out."

Cowie said, "It is one connection across the border ... to overload the routing infrastructure would probably not require the efforts of a nation-state; it could be just one dedicated person."

The loss of Internet connectivity in North Korea would not directly affect the vast majority of its citizens in any case since they are denied it -- along with a long list of more essential human rights and freedoms -- by the country's decades-long dictatorial dynasty.

The only thing most North Koreans might have noticed missing on Monday, according to the BBC, are state-controlled propaganda news sites and a cooking website -- presumably also state-approved.

If there's one bright spot in what's been an embarrassing and distressing ordeal for all involved, on Tuesday Sony Pictures announced it would allow showings of "The Interview" at the one of the few movie theater companies that did not allow itself to be cowed by the anonymous, non-specific threats of violence put forth by ostensibly the same group that hacked Sony. 

"The Interview" -- the comedy based on an assassination plot targeting North Korean dictator Kim Jung-Un that the Sony hacking centered around -- will be shown on Christmas Day at the independent Alamo Drafthouse cinema, an independent theater that criticized Sony Pictures' decision to pull the movie from the start.