Pakistan Took Down YouTube. And It Will Probably Happen Again.

The news popped up on Twitter almost immediately; YouTube was down. After the Amazon S3 outage earlier this month, I'm sure everyone was wondering if YouTube was to blame or Google themselves had gone down. We now know what happened; in Pakistan's attempt to block the video-sharing site due to what it considered to be offensive material about Islam. In doing so, they hijacked some of the IP addresses directing traffic to YouTube, propagated the hijacking to other DNS servers, and essentially routed a good chunk of YouTube's audience nowhere.

What's mindboggling about the incident, and BusinessWeek/ZDNet Asia picked up on, is that there is nothing in place to prevent this from happening again, or shut it down quickly when it occurs. DNS routing is based on an elaborate trust system orchestrated by ICANN, who states that they lack the ability to pull an offending server out of the equation.

In other words, the entire Internet is a elaborate interweaving of trust and any given location can turn at any time, and we have nothing more than a toothless lion in ICANN managing a master list of which server has which AS number. Most webmasters pay more attention to server security than any governing body appears to be paying to the entire virtual infrastructure of the Internet.

This was the result of what is allegedly a simple mistake; a quick-fix change to ban a site for an entire country that was then accidentally propagated to a partner that then created the outage. But just imagine if it had been intentional and directed at more than one site.