Pakistan brings YouTube down
February 26, 2008 by colbert low
Filed under Announcements
Youtube, we have a problem.
Imagine waking up on a Monday and finding your favourite YouTube videos can’t be loaded. Some will curse, some will just get ready for work. For me, it was a real pissed off. The only reason why this happened was Pakistan or more specifically the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority ordered 70 Internet service providers to block access to YouTube.com, because of anti-Islamic movies on the video-sharing site. Pakistan was not pleased with the trailer for an upcoming film by Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders portraying Islam as fascist. Its a big wonder why Pakistan was the only country that did this. The root cause of the problem started when PCCW Ltd. of Hong Kong (one of the world’s 20 largest data carriers) made changes in it switches’ routing table and started directing requests from its global customers for YouTube data to Pakistan, where the data was discarded. Now that was a real dumb move by PCCW.
The block was intended to cover only Pakistan, but extended to about two-thirds of the global Internet population, starting at 1:47 p.m. EST 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.
wow thanks for posting this! I’m located in the us but it’s still good to know as the internet is worldwide.
Yea, the internet is global. That’s why there is the word “inter” on it
As far as I know, it causes some havoc during that time because their ISPs had set the wrong configurations and resulted worldwide inaccessibility of youtube.