The Pakistani government caused a global outage of the popular video-sharing site YouTube.com after an attempt to censor the site within the country accidentally caused internet service providers (ISPs) around the world to block the website for two hours.

Pakistani officials ordered the site to be blocked within Pakistan because it contains material that they believe to be anti-Islamic. However, the redirect that the Pakistani Telecommunications Authority assigned to YouTube.com’s IP address was somehow distributed among the world’s ISPs – meaning that visitors to the site in all countries were confronted with an error message.

There is no suggestion that the outage was anything but accidental. However, the fact that one of the world’s most popular websites can be taken down so easily is a stark reminder of the fragility of the Internet.

Further reading

Cyber hijack comes of age

How to survive a denial of service attack

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