14 DAY TRIAL // The heavy YouTube viewer must have freaked yesterday. For an entire hour, Google's video sharing service was down for no obvious reason like a scheduled maintenance and with no announcement of any sort. Mayhem started on forums as people around the world began reporting the same thing, like Xeroxed: "Can anybody access YouTube? It doesn't seem to work for me, please help."
The consequences were pretty heavy for the Internet as a whole, as many sites that had YT videos embedded loaded a whole lot slower. A warning to what one single service going offline can do to the web. Imagine what were to happen if all of the Google properties were to go down all at once. Perhaps that's one of the reasons why monopoly over a segment isn't such a good idea.
The Pakistani government decided to block the video sharing service because some of its videos presented controversial sketches of the Prophet Mohammad and the whole site was deemed offensive to Islam for allowing the clips to run without censoring them. "Meanwhile Internet users can write to YouTube.com to remove the objectionable web content/movies because this removal would enable the authorities to order un-blocking of this website," a government official told AFP.
While blocking the site, Pakistan Telecom hijacked YouTube's IP address space by accident and they took too long to fix it, as OpenDNS reported. This is literally a world hurt by censorship, come to think of it. For Pakistani the site "will remain blocked till further orders," the official told the cited source. And those further orders would come only after the "blasphemous content, videos and documents" will be removed, as mentioned above.
"It is a deliberate attempt to malign Islam and hurt the feelings of Muslims," Habib Shah Kerani told the protesters from the Anjman-e-Islam (Organization of Islam) group. The oldest war ever, that over religion, still rages on, sadly.