For most countries, a nationwide Internet outage is a big deal. For North Korea, it’s routine.

Even the idea of a nationwide Internet outage can be panic-inducing for those of us who are addicted to our smartphones. But in North Korea, such outages are routine -- and ultimately affect almost no one. The secretive North Korea's connection to the global Internet went dark for more than an hour on the morning of May 11, according to Internet monitoring firm Dyn. But this was roughly the 15th time North Korea had suffered a disruption in connectivity in 2015 alone, according to the company's director of Internet analysis, Doug Madory. North Korea's main digital artery is managed by the state-run Internet provider and connects through China. But only an estimated few thousand North Koreans have access to the global Internet -- and those people are members of the privileged elite, the military, or part of the hermit kingdom's propaganda machine. The rest of the population has access to heavily monitored national intranet of approved sites called the Kwangmyung -- if they have access to anything at all. If the Internet is the information superhighway, you can think of a national intranet as a sort of information cul de sac. This lack of reliance on the Internet puts North Korea in a weird position where it doesn't really matter if its access goes down. "It's not even clear that it's a priority to have the Internet up," said Madory. "It's not really part of their economy, whereas in other places it's a core utility of life."