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From the source of all knowledge

On February 22, 2008, Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) attempted to block regional access to YouTube following a government order. The attempt inadvertently caused a worldwide YouTube blackout that took 2 hours to correct.

Sadly the reference link is broken. How can a websites with presumably servers around the world be accidentally taken out? I'm interested in the technical details of what the authorities did that disabled YouTube.

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I remember that event!

The European IP Network's Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC - the acronym makes more sense in French) issued a case-study about the incident.

On Sunday, 24 February 2008, Pakistan Telecom (AS17557) started an unauthorised announcement of the prefix 208.65.153.0/24. One of Pakistan Telecom's upstream providers, PCCW Global (AS3491) forwarded this announcement to the rest of the Internet, which resulted in the hijacking of YouTube traffic on a global scale.

It contains the technical details on the IP range hijacking.

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  • I remember I was logging into my friends facebook while he was in america, is it possible?
    – localhost
    Jan 22, 2019 at 17:50

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