Flight recorders from the passenger jet that crashed in South Korea last month, killing more than 170 people, stopped working minutes before the plane belly-landed and exploded on the runway, investigators said Saturday.

The black boxes of a Boeing jetliner that crashed in South Korea last month stopped recording about four minutes before the accident, South Korean officials said Saturday, possibly complicating investigations into the cause of the disaster that killed 179 people.

The two flight recorders on board a South Korean airliner stopped working before the jet crashed during an emergency landing and subsequent crash that killed 179 of the 181 people on board, officials said Saturday.