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 some reports. But Shawn White, Keynote's director of external operations, was highly skeptical that one country could knock out YouTube's entire system.
YouTube representatives could not be reached Sunday.
The BBC reported that Pakistan's attempts to block access to YouTube may have been inadvertently caused 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 to 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 a.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. Keynote is unable to uncover the causes of an outage, White said. But he added that he would be shocked if one country had the ability to bring down YouTube globally.
"Based on history and the kind of information and data I'm seeing," White said, "it looks like it may have been some kind of back-end architecture problem. I can't rule anything out but the Internet just isn't that fragile and Google is one of the savviest companies there is. It seems unlikely that Pakistan's government could do anything to effect global users. It just doesn't make any sense to me."
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