Pakistan goes offline after almost killing YouTube

[ikaotiki]

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Well, after the fiasco that was Pakistan’s attempt to block YouTube, the country’s been taken off the Net altogether.

Supposedly PieNet attempted to block YouTube in Pakistan due to a directive from the Pakistani government, the latter calling the site a source of ‘blasphemous’ content. ZDNet reported that PCCW, the telecom company that carries most of Pakistan’s traffic, had to shut the country off the Net.

YouTube was offline for two hours after Pakistani ISP PieNet attempted to block the site in the country. Their means of doing so, by rerouting all of YouTube’s incoming traffic, was a disaster and ended up blocking global traffic to YouTube.

ZDNet’s Richard Stiennon probably has the day’s funniest comment on the incident: “The leadership of Pakistan just created a massive Denial of Service on their own country.”

Pakistan isn’t the only country that’s resorted to policing the Internet with China and Burma also often resorting to blocking sites. But Pakistan’s probably the first to hijack a site altogether. Is this a taste of things to come, where sites deemed potentially ‘dangerous’ being subjected to cyber-tampering? Probably in this case PieNet wasn’t aware of the consequences of their creative re-routing.

But what is going to stop this from happening again to another site? And how are we sure this wasn’t an ‘uninformed accident’? Speculation, as always, will surely continue.