YouTube site 'blocked' in Pakistan over anti-Islamic film clips

Google's hugely popular video-sharing site YouTube on Sunday came to a standstill for about two hours after Pakistan blocked access to the popular Youtube Web site because of anti-Islamic material that have outraged many Muslims.

Most of the world's Internet users lost access to YouTube for several hours Sunday after the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) had ordered 70 Internet service providers (ISPs) to block access to YouTube.com because of the offensive material from Dutch Politician Geert Wilders' a forthcoming film posted on the video-sharing site.

The authority did not specify what the offensive material was, but a PTA official said the ban concerned an inflammatory nature of Wilders' vide trailer for his forthcoming film that portrays Islam as a fascist religion prone to inciting violence against women and homosexuals.

Authority ordered ISPs to re-route traffic away from a specific YouTube URL pointing to the trailer for Wilders' anti-Islamic video that was widely anticipated to stimulate unrest among the Muslim community abroad.

Though, the block was intended to cover only Pakistan, but it extended to about two-thirds of the global Internet population, mainly affecting Asian countries.

YouTube, which Mountain View-based online search leader Google acquired for $1.65 billion in 2006, confirmed the outage Monday, saying it was caused by a network in Pakistan.

"For about two hours [on Sunday], traffic to YouTube was routed according to erroneous Internet Protocols, and many users around the world could not access our site," said a YouTube spokesperson via e-mail. "We have determined that the source of these events was a network in Pakistan. We are investigating and working with others in the Internet community to prevent this from happening again."

Founded in February 2005 by three former employees of PayPal, YouTube is a popular free video sharing website which lets users upload, view, and share video clips. It uses the Adobe Flash technology to display video, and currently is handling a monthly traffic of over 70 million users.

This is not the first time some country has blocked access to YouTube rather in January, a Turkish court ordered the San Bruno-based YouTube to be blocked on account of video clips that allegedly violate the law by insulting the country's founding father, Kemal Ataturk.

Also, the Thai government last spring banned Google-owned YouTube for four months because of the offensive video clips of the country's revered monarch, King Bhumibol Adulyadej.

In May, 2007, many Internet users in Morocco were unable to access YouTube after the Moroccan authority deliberately blocked the site because of user-posted footage critical of Morocco's actions in Western Sahara, a disputed territory which Morocco took control of in 1975.