I know this sounds far-fetched, like something out of a William Gibson novel. But I swear I’m not making this up:

Pakistan didn’t like something on YouTube.

So they tried to block YouTube in Pakistan.

And accidentally blocked YouTube for the whole world.

Whoops!

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Service on Google Inc.’s YouTube site was disrupted around the world for several hours Sunday after a botched effort by the Pakistan government to block access to a video clip critical of Islam.

Pakistan Telecommunication Corp. Ltd., or PTCL… only meant to block YouTube within Pakistan. But erroneous handling of PTCL’s routers inadvertently brought YouTube down.

The instructions sent out across PTCL’s network were meant to apply only to traffic within Pakistan. But somehow that message started getting replicated on the Internet world-wide.

“The traffic that was supposed to be going to our address was being rerouted to Pakistan, and subsequently dropping,” said Mr. Reyes of YouTube.

TechCrunch offers a possible explanation:

The interesting side of the outage is an allegation from OpenDNS that Pakistan Telecom hijacked YouTube’s IP address space resulting in a worldwide outage. They note that the issue was subsequently rectified by PCCW, but it raises the question: is it really that easy to take one of the largest destinations online down?

Filed under: YouTube, video