YouTube outage blamed on Pakistan

[glorybebe]

YouTube outage blamed on Pakistan

Turkey and Thailand have in the past also banned access to the site

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 long 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 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.

What we need to know now is whether this was a mistake or a deliberate attempt by Pakistan to disrupt YouTube

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.

A statement from Google said that the problems lasted for "about 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. Users are quite upset. They're screaming at ISPs which can't do anything

Wahaj-us-Siraj, convener of the Association of Pakistan Internet Service Providers

"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."

PCCW said it was aware of the occurrence and was "reviewing the event with the appropriate internal and external parties."

A leading net professional told BBC News: "This was probably a simple mistake by an engineer at Pakistan Telecom. There's nothing to suggest this was malicious."

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It makes me wonder if it was malicious or not.

[capoeiranger]

We have a thread already about this...I think this was the follow ups...wow, lucky me, I wasn't planning on uploading any videos last Sunday...

[glorybebe]

We have a thread already about this...I think this was the follow ups...wow, lucky me, I wasn't planning on uploading any videos last Sunday...

I didn't see any threads about this, so I posted it. I saw the one about Pakistan blocking youtube, but no one about a worldwide blackout.

[swtp]

I didn't see any threads about this, so I posted it. I saw the one about Pakistan blocking youtube, but no one about a worldwide blackout.

And here i thought it was my old computer that was to blame when i couldn,t get in to you tube for an hour on sunday! I guess i better appologise to poor ole Dino!

[glorybebe]

And here i thought it was my old computer that was to blame when i couldn,t get in to you tube for an hour on sunday! I guess i better appologise to poor ole Dino!

LOL, I know! Every other site would work...I figured the site was down, but had no clue as to why.

[ships-cat]

Sounds like Pakistani Telecom where messing around with their DNS servers. This is NOT a clever thing to do.

Meow Purr.

[Princess Serenity]

I've read the article then I didn't understand it. But I've read the replies.

Maybe Pakistan shouldn't be messing around with websites. Just because they banned Youtube in their country. Doesn't mean they have to mess with it in different countries.

I like Youtube & use it almost everyday.