YouTube Explains Sunday Outage

Notice a problem getting on YouTube Sunday afternoon? There's a reason. YouTube suffered a two-hour long, system-wide outage on Sunday that the company said was triggered by an ISP based, in all places, Pakistan.
YouTube spokesperson Ricardo Reyes: "For about two hours, traffic to YouTube was routed according to erroneous Internet Protocols. 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."
It's being reported from multiple sources that religious authorities in Pakistan were unhappy with a perceived increase in 'blasphemous material' on YouTube. A Pakistan ISP, PieNet, decided it would be good to re-route IP requests for YouTube to whatever site it felt was more appropriate; essentially hijacking internet traffic requesting YouTube to another destination using BGP.
The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the core routing protocol the internet uses. These bad or poisoned BGP routes got picked up by ISPs everywhere and resulted in YouTube simply not showing up on the web browsers of millions of internet users. The telecom company that carries most of Pakistan’s traffic, PCCW, has consequently shut Pakistan off from the internet as the poisoned BGP routes are removed.

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