Pakistan YouTube Ban Propagates Worldwide, Causing Major YouTube Outage

Yesterday, I kept noticing Twitters of YouTube problems. Soon after, the BBC reported YouTube outage blamed on Pakistan. It appears that the recent Pakistan ban of YouTube not only caused Pakistan ISPs to block YouTube, but also spread worldwide and stopped users from even the United States from accessing YouTube. How so? The two-hour YouTube […]

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Yesterday, I kept noticing Twitters of YouTube problems. Soon after, the BBC reported YouTube outage blamed on Pakistan. It appears that the recent Pakistan ban of YouTube not only caused Pakistan ISPs to block YouTube, but also spread worldwide and stopped users from even the United States from accessing YouTube.

How so? The two-hour YouTube “blackout” was reportedly initiated when Pakistan ordered ISPs to block the video-sharing website. One ISP supposedly pushed the request in a more global manner, which caused more ISPs to block YouTube. I personally don’t understand how something like this could have happened. I suspect I am missing one critical detail.


An internet professional told the BBC:

This was probably a simple mistake by an engineer at Pakistan Telecom. There’s nothing to suggest this was malicious.

All this started over someone uploading Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad that have outraged many.


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a technologist and a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics.

In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.

Barry can be followed on X here and you can learn more about Barry Schwartz over here or on his personal site.

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