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February 26, 2008
Pakistan Ban Causes Worldwide YouTube Outage
By Anshu Shrivastava TMCnet Contributing Editor
The government of Pakistan attempted to block YouTube (News - Alert) access in that country, and in the process reportedly affected Internet users in other countries Sunday, when the video sharing site was unavailable for about two hours.
YouTube said on Monday that many users around the world could not access the site because traffic had been routed according to erroneous Internet protocol addresses.
The source of the problem was a network in Pakistan, YouTube said in a statement.
Associated Press reported that the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) had ordered 70 Internet service providers on Friday to block access to YouTube.com because of anti-Islamic movies on the video-sharing site.
According to a PTA official, the ban concerned a trailer for an upcoming film by Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders, who has plans to release a movie portraying Islam as fascist and prone to inciting violence against women and homosexuals.
An Internet expert told AP that Sunday’s problems came after a Pakistani telecommunications company complied with the block by directing requests for YouTube videos to a “black hole.” “So instead of serving up videos of skateboarding dogs, it sent the traffic into oblivion,” he said.
He explained that the company also accidentally identified itself to Internet computers as the world's fastest route to YouTube, leading requests from across the Internet to the black hole.
The block was intended to cover only Pakistan, but it extended to about two-thirds of the global Internet population, and the greatest effect was in Asia, where the outage lasted for up to two hours, according to the AP report.
“We are investigating and working with others in the Internet community to prevent this from happening again,” YouTube said in an e-mailed statement.
A spokesman for the PTA said on Tuesday the order had been lifted after YouTube removed the content deemed insulting to Islam, according to news reports.
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Communications industry. The library offers whitepapers, case studies and other documents which are free to registered users. Today’s featured white paper is The “BRAIN” Model of Intelligibility in Business Telephony, brought to you by Polycom (News - Alert).
Communications industry. The library offers whitepapers, case studies and other documents which are free to registered users. Today’s featured white paper is The “BRAIN” Model of Intelligibility in Business Telephony, brought to you by Polycom (News - Alert).Anshu Shrivastava is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Anshu’s articles, please visit her columnist page.
