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Pakistan YouTube blackout hits global users

By Andrew Redfern @ 25th February 2008 1:29 pm

On Sunday Reuters reported that Pakistan authorities had blocked access to YouTube over the site carrying the Danish cartoons that caused so much offense last year.

Pakistan ordered local Internet service providers to block access to the popular Youtube Web site because of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad that have outraged many Muslims, an industry official said on Sunday.

The cartoons, published in Danish newspapers in 2005 and again earlier this month, angered Muslims because of their depiction of the Prophet Mohammad.

“They asked us to ban it immediately … and the order says the ban will continue until further notice,” said Wahaj-us-Siraj, convener of the Association of Pakistan Internet Service Providers.

But according to the BBC today the blackout affected global YouTube users with the site going offline for two hours

They state “Pakistan’s attempts to block access to YouTube have been blamed for a near global blackout of the site on Sunday.

Google, the owner of YouTube, blamed the outage on “erroneous internet protocols”, sourced in Pakistan. BBC News has learned that the nearly two hour blackout was almost certainly connected to Pakistan Telecom and internet service provider PCCW.

The country ordered ISPs to block the video-sharing website because of content deemed offensive to Islam.”

The article continues :

The BBC News website’s technology editor, Darren Waters, says that to block Pakistan’s citizens from accessing YouTube it is believed Pakistan Telecom “hijacked” the web server address of the popular video site.

Those details were then passed on to the country’s internet service providers so that anyone in Pakistan attempting to go to YouTube was instead re-directed to a different address.

But the details of the “hijack” were leaked out into the wider internet from PCCW and as a result YouTube was mistakenly blocked by internet service providers around the world. The block on the servers was lifted once PCCW had been told of the issue by engineers at YouTube.

Google say the site was down for two hours. “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.”

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