Pakistan Temporarily Shuts Down YouTube

Posted on February 24, 2008

The BBC is reporting that Pakistan's attempts to block YouTube resulted in an hour-long nearly worldwide blockage of YouTube's website.

BBC News has learned that the outage was almost certainly connected to Pakistan Telecom and Asian internet service provider PCCW.
A leading net professional said the global outage was "probably a mistake".
Pakistan ordered internet service providers to block the site because of content deemed offensive to Islam.
The BBC News website's technology editor, Darren Waters, says that to block Pakistan's citizens from accessing YouTube it is believed Pakistan Telecom "hijacked" the web server address of the popular video site.

Reporters Without Borders, Christian Science Monitor and Boing Boing say Pakistan was trying to block all those "blasphemous" non-Islamic videos. Earlier, OpenDNS told its concerned users that it was a Pakistan Telecom problem not an OpenDNS issue. For more on the story see Google Operating System and Theat Chaos.