Monday, February 25, 2008

Pakistan's Censors Target YouTube, Trigger Brief World-Wide Outage - WSJ.com

Oops...

PTCL is Pakistan's largest telecommunications company, and controls the vast majority of the nation's network infrastructure. According to several people familiar with the matter, the company only meant to block YouTube within Pakistan. But erroneous handling of PTCL's routers inadvertently brought YouTube down, according to an explanation offered by two people with knowledge of the situation in Pakistan.

PTCL was simply trying to block traffic from YouTube to Pakistan, a process commonly known as "black holing," according to these people. 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, and other Internet service providers started experiencing trouble accessing the site.

Pakistan's Censors Target YouTube, Trigger Brief World-Wide Outage - WSJ.com

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