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Pakistan causes YouTube outage |
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Written by Ali Jaafar
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Tuesday, 26 February 2008 |
ONDON — Pakistan’s attempts to block users in the country from
accessing anti-Islamic content on YouTube may have been behind a
near-global outage on the vidclip site Sunday.
Google, the owners
of YouTube, released a statement reading, “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.”
Service
was reportedly restored after YouTube engineers contacted staff at
Pakistan Telecom and Internet service provider PCCW, whose attempts to
block domestic users from accessing the web inadvertently routed global
YouTube traffic to “erroneous Internet protocols,” added the Google
statement.
The outage lasted approximately two hours.
It
is unclear exactly which content had been deemed offensive, although
reports suggest it may have been a trailer of right-wing Dutch politico
Geert Wilders’ forthcoming anti-Islam short film or reproductions of
the now-infamous Danish cartoons lampooning the Prophet Mohammed.
YouTube has fallen foul of political censors in a number of countries in the past, including Thailand, Brazil and Turkey.
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