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Pakistan Caused Global YouTube Problems
David Utter
Staff Writer
2008-02-25
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An outage lasting about two hours took YouTube off the Internet due to an attempt by the Pakistani government to block the site.
 | | Pakistan Caused Global YouTube Problems |  |
In blocking YouTube over offensive content, Pakistan managed to get the site knocked into an inaccessible state for a couple of hours on Sunday.
The BBC reported how a directive from the government led Pakistan Telecom and national ISP PCCW to prevent access to YouTube. Pakistani visitors should have been redirected to another page when trying to reach the video sharing site.
Somehow, the blocking managed to leak from Pakistan to other Internet service providers around the world. YouTube became unavailable for millions of people. The BBC cited a statement from YouTube's owner, Google, on the problem:
"Traffic to YouTube was routed according to erroneous internet protocols, and many users around the world could not access our site," it said. "We have determined that the source of these events was a network in Pakistan. We are investigating and working with others in the internet community to prevent this from happening again."
Complaints about the problem hit other ISPs, which were unable to do anything about the problem. "Youtube.com is down right now because Pakistan Telecom has decided to (accidentally probably) hijack their IP address space which means that nobody in the world can reach Youtube," OpenDNS founder David Ulevitch said on Sunday. "This isn't an OpenDNS issue."
About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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