Pakistan 'Hijacks' YouTube, Causes Global Outage
Posted on: Monday, 25 February 2008, 21:20 CST
Two days after the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority ordered the country’s 70 internet providers to block public access to the video-sharing site YouTube, the Web site experienced a near-global blackout."Traffic to YouTube was routed according to erroneous internet protocols, and many users around the world could not access our site," a statement from Google explained.
In order to block public access to the site, it is believed that Pakistan Telecom "hijacked" the web server address, according to BBC News. By doing this, anyone who attempted to reach the site was redirected elsewhere. But the bigger issue grew when the block was leaked out into the internet by Hong-Kong based provider PCCW causing YouTube to be blocked by other ISPs around the world.
A statement from Google, YouTube’s owner, confirmed the outage on Monday, saying it was caused by a network in Pakistan. The block lasted "about two hours.”
The global blackout by the PTA was most likely accidental, and not vicious in nature .
"This was probably a simple mistake by an engineer at Pakistan Telecom. There's nothing to suggest this was malicious,” an analyst told BBC News.
Todd Underwood, vice president and general manager of Internet community services at Renesys said that both Pakistan Telecom and PCCW made critical mistakes.
Pakistan Telecom's mistake was that it then published that route to its international data carrier, PCCW Ltd. of Hong Kong, Underwood said.
Second, he said, PCCW, one of the world's 20 largest data carriers, accepted that route. Its routing table was passed along to other large carriers without any attempt at verification.
"We are investigating and working with others in the Internet community to prevent this from happening again," YouTube said in a statement.
Officials had denied access to the site because of a trailer for an upcoming film by Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders, who had announced that he hoped to release a movie which portrays the Islamic religion as fascist and violent toward women and homosexuals.
The PTA has re-opened public access to the site, while several interviews of Wilders were still up on the site Monday afternoon, according to Associated Press.
"We are pleased to confirm that YouTube is again accessible in Pakistan," said a YouTube spokesman.
Underwood said that the event serves as an important lesson for internet users.
"To be honest, there's not a single thing preventing this from happening to E-Trade, or Bank of America, or the FBI, or the White House, or the Clinton campaign," Underwood said. "I think it's a useful moment for people to decide just how important it is that we fix problems like this."
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On the Net:
YouTube
Renesys Corp.
PCCW Ltd.
Source: redOrbit Staff and Wire Reports
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