YouTube redirected to Pakistan

25 February 2008

Video sharing website YouTube was unavailable to much of the world yesterday, after an apparent attempt to block it within Pakistan went wrong.

BBC News reports that the site was unavailable for almost two hours on Sunday evening, an outage that Google described as due to "erroneous internet protocols".

A more technical article on the ars technica website explains that a filter set up by the Pakistan Telecom Authority to block YouTube's IP address range was accidentally propagated to the wider internet. This caused requests originating from outside Pakistan to be directed away from YouTube's servers.

Meanwhile, users of web-based RSS reader Bloglines have been complaining that many feeds tracked by the service have failed to update with new content. Some sites report that user complaints began in mid-February, while Techcrunch and Search Engine Journal both say that no feeds at all updated on Sunday.

Bloglines appeared to be updating again by Monday evening, however.

Category: Video sharing