Insecure routing redirects YouTube to Pakistan By Iljitsch van Beijnum | Published: February 25, 2008 - 03:31AM CT
On Sunday, YouTube became unreachable from most, if not all, of the Internet. No "sorry we're down" or cutesy kitten-with-screwdriver page, nothing. What happened was that packets sent to YouTube were flowing to Pakistan. Which was curious, because the Pakistan government had just instituted a ban on the popular video sharing site. What apparently happened is that Pakistan Telecom routed the address block that YouTube's servers are into a "black hole" as a simple measure to filter access to the service. However, this routing information escaped from Pakistan Telecom to its ISP PCCW in Hong Kong, which propagated the route to the rest of the world. So any packets for YouTube would end up in Pakistan Telecom's black hole instead.
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