Date: Monday, February 25, 2008
YouTube Crashes after Pakistan Ban
Video sharing website YouTube suffered a near global crash for two hours on Sunday after access to the site was banned in Pakistan. Engineers from Pakistan Telecom were acting on orders from the government to restrict access to the site, but accidentally caused a global blackout.
The Pakistan Telecom engineers were thought to have hijacked the address of YouTube’s web server, so it could be passed on the Internet service providers in the country. However, the details were accidentally leaked out to a wider number of Internet service providers, who then mistakenly blocked the site as a result. The problem was rectified when engineers at YouTube told Internet service provider PCCW about the errors.
Google released a statement yesterday, which admitted YouTube was disrupted on Sunday due to problems with a Pakistan network. It said: "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."
Speculation suggested that Pakistan might have sabotaged the site deliberately, although web security experts have rubbished these claims. The country’s government chose to ban access to the site due to a number of anti-Islamic films that were posted there. One of these films was thought to be the trailer to an upcoming film by Geert Wilders, which portrays Islam as a fascist religion that is violent towards women and homosexuals.
Pakistan is not the only country to have blocked access to YouTube. Turkey blocked the site earlier this year after some video clips were found to insult the country's founding father, Kemal Ataturk. Thailand and Morocco have also been recently subject to YouTube bans.
Source:
Guardian
BBC
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