Pakistan meddling shuts down YouTube
February 26, 2008
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The Pakistan Government cut YouTube access to two third’s of the world’s internet users when it tried to block access at home.
The outage, for several hours on Sunday, was caused after the the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) ordered 70 internet service providers to block access to YouTube.com because of anti-Islamic movies on the video-sharing site.
The authority did not say what the offensive material was but a PTA official told the Associated Press the ban concerned a trailer for a film by Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who has said he plans to release a movie portraying Islam as fascist and prone to inciting violence against women and homosexuals.
The block was meant to cover only only Pakistan but extended to about two-thirds of the global internet population, starting at 5.47pm (AEDT), according to Renesys Corporation, a US firm that keeps track of the internet.
The greatest effect was in Asia, were the outage lasted for up to two hours, Renesys said.
YouTube confirmed the outage yesterday, saying it was caused by a network in Pakistan.
“We are investigating and working with others in the Internet community to prevent this from happening again,” YouTube said.
A YouTube spokeswoman did not say whether the clips that offended Pakistan’s Government had been removed. Several clips with interviews of Wilders were still up on the site yesterday afternoon, the AP said.
The outage comes less than a month after broken fibre-optic cables in the Mediterranean took Egypt off line and caused communications problems from the Middle East to India.
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