YouTube experienced an outage lasting almost two hours last night after an attempt by the Pakistani government to block access to the site for its citizens.
Pakistan, a Muslim state, ordered the country’s ISPs to block access to the Google owned site due to content being available which it deems is offensive to Islam.
Access Blocked
According to The BBC, Pakistan Telecom, and the country’s main ISP PCCW, blocked access by hijacking YouTube web server address.
Anyone based in the country who then attempted to visit the video sharing site was redirected to an unknown alternative site. Unfortunately, the hijack didn’t stop there, and was leaked to the wider Internet.
This meant that ISPs around the world started blocking access too, which resulted in the site being unobtainable by users in Germany, China, USA, Russia, the UK, and Australia.
Down For Two Hours
The problem lasted for approximately two hours, before YouTube engineers issued a statement concerning the problem, and PCCW stopped the blockage,
The statement read:
“Traffic to YouTube was routed according to erroneous internet protocols, and many users around the world could not access our site,”
“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.”
A Simple Mistake?
So was this a simple mistake by an unlucky Pakistani engineer, or something altogether more sinister?
The Pakistani government has been rumoured to be monitoring content available on YouTube for a while, and then made the move to officially ban its citizens from accessing the site.
Most reports concur that the move was brought about because footage of the Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, which caused outrage amongst Muslims last year, is on YouTube.
There is also the possibility that the final straw was a trailer for a Dutch film by Geert Wilders, which portrays Islam in a negative light. Either or, it still makes me wonder what has happened to democracy?
Conclusions
Pakistan isn’t the first country to block access to YouTube, with China, Thailand, Turkey and Brazil all being guilty of it at some point in the past.
Pakistan is however, the first one to go about it in quite this fashion, and bring the whole site crashing down and be inaccessible for more than just its own citizens for a couple of hours.
