Pakistan Ban Blamed for YouTube Crash

Sunday’s two-hour near global crash of the video sharing website YouTube has been blamed on "erroneous internet protocols" in Pakistan.

Some speculation suggested that the Pakistan government might have caused the crash deliberately, although web experts were quick to dismiss this idea. They pointed out that it was more likely Pakistan Telecom engineers caused the crash in error when they were hijacking the address of YouTube to pass on to the country’s 70 Internet service providers, so that they could enforce the Pakistan ban of the site. Indeed, it is thought that this address was accidentally sent to many more ISPs, who mistakenly blocked the site from their servers too. This problem was discovered and rectified after a YouTube engineer informed Pakistan Internet service provider PCCW about the error.

In a statement released on Monday, YouTube owners Google admitted that there was a disruption, although it said that it would work hard to prevent similar problems in the future. The statement 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."

The government in Pakistan decided to prevent access to the video sharing site in reaction to a number of anti-Islamic films, which were posted there. It is unclear which films angered the Pakistan government, although one was thought to be the trailer to a forthcoming film by Dutch politician Geert Wilders, which indicates that Islam is a fascist religion that is violent towards women and homosexuals.

Pakistan is just the latest in a number of countries to ban YouTube. In January, Turkey blocked access to the site after some videos were found to insult the country's founding father. Both Thailand and Morocco also recently banned access to the site for similar reasons.

Source:

Guardian
BBC