Updated, 7:03 p.m. to add Keynote System's analysis and skepticism that Pakistan was cause of outage.
YouTube suffered a system-wide outage on Sunday that lasted two hours according to Keynote Systems, which measures Web site performance. The outage may have been inadvertently caused by Pakistan, according to reports. Shawn White, Keynote's director of external operations, was highly skeptical that one country could knock out YouTube's entire system.
Representatives from the company could not be reached Sunday.
The BBC reported that Pakistan's attempts to block access to YouTube may have been inadvertently been responsible for the outage. Earlier in the day, Pakistan shutoff access to the video site to its country's residents in response to the posting of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad that have outraged many Muslims.
The BBC Web site's technology editor, Darren Waters, says that it's likely that--to prevent Pakistan's residents from accessing the site--Pakistan Telecom hijacked YouTube's IP and passed that information on the country's Internet service providers so that queries to YouTube would be redirected. However, the details were apparently leaked by Asian ISP PCCW, leading to the global blackout, the BCC reported.
Engineers at YouTube were able to lift the blockade after contacting PCCW, according to the report.
"This was probably a simple mistake by an engineer at Pakistan Telecom," an unidentified "leading net professional" told the BCC. "There's nothing to suggest this was malicious."
According to White, Keynote first logged YouTube's outage at 10:48 p.m. PT, and the site did not come back online until about 12:51 p.m.
Attempts to log on to the Google-owned site typically timed out.
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