Earlier this week, YouTube suffered an outage which lasted for almost two hours, a serious amount of time for the second most popular website on the Net.

The whole Internet went crazy with rumours and theories, and the news spread like wildfire, popping up on Twitter almost immediately. After the Amazon S3 outage earlier this month, I’m sure everyone was wondering if YouTube was to blame or Google themselves had gone down.

What Happened?

We now know what happened; Pakistan attempted to block the video-sharing site due to what it considered to be offensive material about Islam.

In doing so, they hijacked some of the IP addresses directing traffic to YouTube, propagated the hijacking to other DNS servers, and essentially routed a good chunk of YouTube’s audience nowhere.

This Could Happen On A Larger Scale

What’s mind boggling about the incident, and BusinessWeek/ZDNet Asia picked up on, is that there is nothing in place to prevent this from happening again, or shut it down quickly when it occurs. 

DNS routing is based on an elaborate trust system orchestrated by ICANN, who states that they lack the ability to pull an offending server out of the equation.

In other words, the entire Internet is a elaborate interweaving of trust and any given location can turn at any time, and we have nothing more than a toothless lion in ICANN managing a master list of which server has which AS number. 

Conclusions

Most webmasters pay more attention to server security than any governing body appears to be paying to the entire virtual infrastructure of the Internet.

This was the result of what is allegedly a simple mistake; a quick-fix change to ban a site for an entire country that was then accidentally propagated to a partner that then created the outage. But just imagine if it had been intentional and directed at more than one site.

This article is based on Profy post written by Cyndy Aleo-Carreira.

Have Something To Say?