Russia's Sakhalin Island Mysteriously Disappears After N Korea's Missile Launch

The Pacific island of Sakhalin has partially disappeared from Russia’s Yandex map service. The technical glitch mysteriously coincided with the DPRK’s missile launch towards the Japanese island of Hokkaido, not far from Sakhalin.

The online maps of Russian IT company Yandex do not show the island of Sakhalin anymore. The Far Eastern island has disappeared on the Yandex maps when viewing between 180 and 3000 kilometers from Earth's surface.

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The glitch was first observed both on the Yandex website and its iOS and Android apps at around 2 a.m. Moscow time on Tuesday night (23 p.m GMT on Monday), coinciding with North Korea's launch of a missile. It flew over Japan before falling into the Pacific Ocean 1,180 kilometers from the Japan's northern island of Hokkaido, not far from the neighboring Russian island of Sakhalin.

Yandex officials explained the cause of the failure. According to the corporation's press secretary, Dmitry Gorchakov, the Sakhalin "loss" occurred while the map service was being updated. "We have already fixed this technical problem, and Sakhalin will soon be back in both the mobile and the web version of our service," he said.