Pakistan puts global block on YouTube

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A worldwide outage of popular video clip website YouTube was caused by a blocking attempt by Pakistani authorities according to the BBC.

YouTube was unavailable for around two hours on Sunday, after Pakistan Telecom and internet service provider PCCW implemented a block on the site which was only supposed to stop traffic from Pakistan, but instead blocked users around the globe.

The ban was ordered by Pakistan's Ministry of Information Technology, because of supposed anti-Islamic content on the site. The ban was lifted again on Tuesday.

Pakistan Telecom is understood to have set up an IP hijack that would automatically re-direct visitors in Pakistan away from the site. However, when the details of the redirect were passed on to Pakistan's ISPs, it was then mistakenly released to ISP's worldwide, who also redirected traffic.

A statement from Google 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 UAE's Telecommunications Regulatory Authority has stated that YouTube will not be completely banned in the UAE, as they already regulate the content.

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