YouTube outage blamed on Pakistan

Nearly 2 hours of black-out

25 February 2008 12:23 GMT / By Katie Scott

A near 2-hour global black-out on YouTube has been blamed on Pakistani efforts to block the video-sharing site.

Google, which owns YouTube, blamed the outage on "erroneous internet protocols", sourced in Pakistan and pointed 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 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 website's server address then passed these 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.

However, the details of the "hijack" were leaked out into the wider internet from PCCW and as a result YouTube was mistakenly blocked by ISPs around the world.

The block on the servers was only lifted once PCCW had been told of the issue by engineers at YouTube.

Other countries that have temporarily blocked access to YouTube include Turkey and Thailand.

Full tags

Software, Websites, Online, YouTube, Google, ISPs