YouTube Block in Pakistan

Most of the world's Internet users lost access to YouTube for several hours Sunday after an attempt by Pakistan's government to block access domestically affected other countries.

As Pakistan government block the access of YouTube that affected other countries. Everybody was thinking it may be the problem of broken fiber-optic cables. But an Internet expert explained that Sunday's problems arose when a Pakistani telecommunications company accidentally identified itself to Internet computers as the world's fastest route to YouTube. But instead of serving up videos of skateboarding dogs, it sent the traffic into oblivion.

Pakistani government of Pervez Musharraf became worried that a video clip attacking Islam might generate widespread unrest among its Muslim population. So on Firday, the government asked the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, which oversees the country’s Internet providers, to cut off access to YouTube for the country’s estimated 8.2 million Internet users.

The block was intended to cover only Pakistan, but extended to about two-thirds of the global Internet population, starting at 10:47 a.m. PST Sunday, according to Renesys Corp., a Manchester, N.H., firm that keeps track of the pathways of the Internet for telecommunications companies and other clients.

YouTube confirmed the outage Monday, saying it was caused by a network in Pakistan.

"We are investigating and working with others in the Internet community to prevent this from happening again," YouTube said in an e-mailed statement.

But two critical errors allowed Pakistan’s action to echo around the globe for at least a brief period on Sunday afternoon, according to Martin A. Brown, a data engineer at the Renesys Corporation, an Internet monitoring company, which posted a timeline of the incident on its Web site.

As part of its effort to block YouTube within the country, Pakistan Telecom created a dummy route that essentially discarded YouTube traffic, sending it into what Internet experts call a black hole.

Pakistan Telecom then made an error by announcing that dummy route to its own telecommunications partner, PCCW, based in Hong Kong, shortly before noon New York time on Sunday, according to Renesys.

PCCW then made a second error, accepting that dummy route for YouTube and relaying it to other Internet providers around the world.

Pakistan Telecom and the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority were unavailable for comment Monday. Rex Stover, vice president of sales for PCCW Global in Herndon, Va., said the company is still trying to figure out what happened and why.

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