I noticed the other day that YouTube experienced a Global Outage, I did a little digging to find out what exactly happened. This is something I do routinely when a large site goes down so I can learn from others mistakes and use what I learn to insure that my clients websites don’t suffer a similar fate. This incident is kind of interesting in that I have never seen a case where a Country was able to block the entire world from a website. I still have a lot of questions about this and haven’t really found any answers as to how this really went down. Here’s what I did find on WHIR about this…
In a statement released by YouTube on Monday, many users around the world could not access the website for about two hours because traffic had been routed according to erroneous Internet protocols.
According to reports, Pakistan ordered local Internet service providers to block access to the website because it was running material insulting to Islam. However, a government telecommunications official said there was no intention to block the website worldwide. The order has now been lifted after YouTube removed the content deemed insulting to Islam.
The authority had earlier justified its order to block access in Pakistan saying it was necessary to avoid unrest in the predominantly Muslim country of 160 million people and that the video content had the potential to cause more possible loss of life and property across the country.
Internet monitoring firm Renesys says the block extended over two-thirds of the global Internet population, with the greatest affect seen in Asia where the outage lasted for up to two hours.
My Question is, how did this happen? My guess is that somehow it happened through DNS, but I am not for sure. If anyone has any knowledge how this happened please hit me back. Here’s a link to WHIR’s artcile on this outage: Web Host Industry News | Pakistan Causes YouTube Blackout
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