Russia's largest island mysteriously wiped off the map after North Korea missile test

Russia's largest island, Sakhalin, mysteriously disappeared at the same time North Korea fired its most "provocative" nuclear missile test over Japan. However, no alarms were raised as the island vanished from an online mapping service.

Yandex, which is often referred to as Russia's answer to Google, also provides a maps tool and an unfortunately-timed bug caused the 76,000-square-kilomometre island to disappear from the middle of the Pacific Ocean in the wake of the.

The mysterious glitch was spotted in the hours following an ICBM test was fired from Pyongyang over Japan's Hokkaido island, which lies just south of Sakhalin, and landed in the sea.

Users were unable to find the island on either its desktop or mobile platforms when zoomed in between 180 and 3000 kilometres.

However, there was nothing serious to worry about, Sakhalin was still standing. The Russian internet giant identified the disappearance was caused by a bug during a daily update.

"Today during the latest update there was a technical failure, a result of which was that Sakhalin did not appear at some scales," a Yandex spokesperson confirmed. "We have already corrected this, and soon Sakhalin will return to both the mobile and web version of the service."

Since the statement was released, Sakhalin island has now returned to full visibility on the map service.

The incident naturally caused social media users to speculate over Sakhalin's status and whether the missile was to blame for it vanishing. It also raised once more conspiracies and speculation that Russian authorities deliberately 'scramble' GPS services for security reasons, however there is no evidence of this.

The missile test from North Korea was the first to fly over Japan in eight years and has been condemned by UK foreign secretary, Boris Johnson who described it as a "reckless provocation".