Most of the world’s Internet users lost access to YouTube for half an hour on Sunday causing a mini-meltdown and alarming users.
Pakistan is being speculated as the source of the outage. However, there is no substantial evidence of this and speculations have risen due to another global outage of the platform which took place almost 10 years ago.
According to a report in the Hindustan Times, in 2008 when YouTube was still at its nascent stage, the video networking platform was cut off for almost two-thirds of the world following a crackdown by the Pakistan government.
On February 23, 2008, Pakistan imposed a ban on YouTube over “offensive material” on its platform. Inadvertently, the blockage, which lasted almost two hours, was extended to other countries, ultimately leading to a blackout in several markets including Turkey, Thailand and parts of Middle East.
“For about two hours, traffic to YouTube was routed according to erroneous Internet Protocols,” a YouTube spokesperson had said.
“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.”
According to a BBC report, it was believed that Pakistan Telecom (local telecom firm) had “hijacked” YouTube’s IP in order to redirect traffic coming to the platform. Hong Kong-based PCCW which then provided Internet link to Pakistan Telecom, redirected traffic to a blocked network, misleading ISPs.