Pakistan blocked global access to YouTube

WASHINGTON, Feb. 25 (UPI) -- Authorities in Pakistan disrupted worldwide access to the video-sharing Web site YouTube during the weekend in preventing it from being seen by Pakistanis.

The outage, which lasted about two hours, came after the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority, the nation's telecom regulator, ordered Internet service providers to block access to a YouTube video -- a trailer for a controversial film about the Koran being made by Dutch politician Geert Wilders.

A YouTube spokesman confirmed to United Press International that access to the site was disrupted globally for about two hours Sunday.

"Traffic to YouTube was routed according to erroneous Internet protocols, and many users around the world could not access our site," read a statement the firm e-mailed to UPI Monday.

"We have determined that the source of these events was a network in Pakistan," the statement continued. "We are investigating and working with others in the Internet community to prevent this from happening again."

Daniel Castro of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation told UPI the outage was a by-product of the open architecture of the Internet, and the way in which Web traffic is routed.