Pakistan is responsible for almost total blackout of YouTube, the popular video site, around the world. The BBC is reporting that the hour-long global outage was almost certainly connected to Pakistan Telecom and Asian internet service provider PCCW.
The BBC News website's technology editor, Darren Waters, says that to block Pakistan's citizens from accessing YouTube it is believed Pakistan Telecom "hijacked" the web server address of the popular video site.
In the last couple of days, the Pakistan Telecom Authority was being attacked by the bloggers and others in Pakistan for attempting to block anti-government video content. Some believed it had to with alleged "election rigging" by MQM. In fact, the motivation was to block access to material deemed offensive to Muslims. It is thought that, unlike the filters in China and Saudi Arabia, Pakistani filters lack the ability to stop content selectively and block the entire domains instead.
A leading net professional told BBC News: "This was probably a simple mistake by an engineer at Pakistan Telecom. There's nothing to suggest this was malicious."
IP hijacking involves taking over a web site's unique address by corrupting the internet's Domain Name Servers (DNS) that resolve domain names to specific IP addresses and direct the flow of data around the world.
Showing posts with label Outage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Outage. Show all posts
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Monday, February 4, 2008
Conspiracy Theorists on the Internet Outage
Iran has been completely cut off. Israel, Iraq and Lebanon are not affected at all.
With several undersea cables cut within days, the rest of the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia including India and Pakistan are having serious Internet problems. Is all of this just a coincidence? These questions are being raised in various ways and reported by Jerusalem Post and CNN on the causes of this massive outage. Many find it difficult to accept the ostensible reason: Ships dragging anchors cut all of these cables. It seems to be too much of a coincidence. The conspiracy theorists of all stripes are having a field day while others are calling for a serious investigation into the causes to prevent such outages in the future.
Regarding the latest status in Pakistan, blogger Masud Reza is reporting as follows:
"PTCL and TWA-1 both have arranged for additional capacity on SMW4 segment 1 from SingTel. PTCL has successfully brought an STM-4 and three STM-1s in operation whereas TWA1 has been able to acquire four STM-1 circuits from SingTel.
So for PTCL users, things should be near to normal now and for TWA1 things should improve dramatically."
With increasig dependence of the world on the Internet connectivity, such incidents of outages take on special strategic significance. In some instances, Internet connections represent the lifelines of global companies with operations spread over Middle East, Asia and Latin America. World trade and global investments also take a beating in the absence of the Internet. Globalization, whether you like it or hate it, relies greatly on the Internet connectivity. Regardless of the conspiracy theories and theorists, there is clearly a need to understand and improve the reliability of the Internet.
With several undersea cables cut within days, the rest of the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia including India and Pakistan are having serious Internet problems. Is all of this just a coincidence? These questions are being raised in various ways and reported by Jerusalem Post and CNN on the causes of this massive outage. Many find it difficult to accept the ostensible reason: Ships dragging anchors cut all of these cables. It seems to be too much of a coincidence. The conspiracy theorists of all stripes are having a field day while others are calling for a serious investigation into the causes to prevent such outages in the future.
Regarding the latest status in Pakistan, blogger Masud Reza is reporting as follows:
"PTCL and TWA-1 both have arranged for additional capacity on SMW4 segment 1 from SingTel. PTCL has successfully brought an STM-4 and three STM-1s in operation whereas TWA1 has been able to acquire four STM-1 circuits from SingTel.
So for PTCL users, things should be near to normal now and for TWA1 things should improve dramatically."
With increasig dependence of the world on the Internet connectivity, such incidents of outages take on special strategic significance. In some instances, Internet connections represent the lifelines of global companies with operations spread over Middle East, Asia and Latin America. World trade and global investments also take a beating in the absence of the Internet. Globalization, whether you like it or hate it, relies greatly on the Internet connectivity. Regardless of the conspiracy theories and theorists, there is clearly a need to understand and improve the reliability of the Internet.
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