The world looses Youtube for several hours

Nearly all the worlds’ internet users were unable to access the extremely popular Youtube website on for several hours on Sunday, and Monday. This was caused by the government of Pakistan, attempting to block domestic use of the website.

The loss of Youtube for a few hours in itself is nothing more than a minor inconvenience. But that would be overlooking the significance of this outage.

Just a few weeks ago, a broken fibre-optic cable in the Mediterranean switched off the Internet in Egypt. The ripple effect caused communications difficulties throughout the Middle East, and all the way to India.

The problem arose when Pakistani technicians, accidentally identified their national system to other Internet computers as ‘the world’s fastest route to YouTube’. This error blacked out YouTube, across the world.

The problem began on Friday last week, when officials at the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority instructed over 70 ISPs to block access to YouTube. This order was given because of what Pakistan sees as anti-Islamic movies being shown on the Google owned site.

The ban apparently stemmed from a trailer for a soon to be released movie that portrays as Islam as a fascist religion, prone to violence against homosexuals and women.

The planned blockage was intended for domestic services within Pakistan. But because of the technical error, approximately two thirds of all YouTube viewers around the globe lost contact with the page.

The biggest effect was in neighbouring Asian countries. YouTube confirmed Monday that the outage did originate in Pakistan. They issued a statement via e-mail saying: “We are investigating and working with others in the Internet community to prevent this from happening again,”

Pakistan Telecom and the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority were unavailable for comment.
This is not the first such occurrence, four years ago a Turkish telecom worker accidentally indicated that theirs was the best route for ‘all of the internet’, causing outages for websites across the world that lasted for several hours.

Story link: The world looses Youtube for several hours