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Retrospective · Pakistan, February 2008 · published 21 October 2026

The day Pakistan took YouTube offline for the whole world

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On a Sunday evening in February 2008, YouTube vanished for much of the world for about two hours. Nobody attacked it. A provider in Pakistan tried to block YouTube inside the country, and its instructions leaked to the rest of the internet.

What happened

24 Feb 2008, 18:47 UTC Pakistan Telecom, ordered to block YouTube nationally, started announcing a route for a block of YouTube's addresses (208.65.153.0/24) so it could send that traffic nowhere. The announcement was more specific than YouTube's own, and networks prefer the more specific route.
Within minutes Its upstream provider, PCCW, passed the route on, and much of the internet started sending YouTube's traffic to Pakistan.
20:07 – 20:18 UTC YouTube fought back by announcing even more specific routes for its own addresses.
21:01 UTC PCCW withdrew the routes from Pakistan Telecom, ending the hijack. Depending on where you were, YouTube had been unreachable for somewhere between about an hour and a half and a bit over two hours.

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Why it mattered

The internet's routing system, BGP, largely runs on trust: networks believe what their neighbours announce. One mistaken announcement in one country took down one of the world's most visited sites everywhere. The incident became the classic example used to argue for route filtering and for systems that check who is allowed to announce which addresses (RPKI), which are now spreading.

What Blackout Map would show

Pakistan's own internet worked normally, so the map would stay green; this is not a country outage. It is exactly what our routing panel is for, though: Cloudflare Radar flags route hijacks and leaks, and we show them on the country page of the network that made the announcement. And with our website checks, YouTube's own page would show it unreachable, along with the reports people send.

Sources

Blackout Map is a live map of internet outages and shutdowns around the world. Open the map · Security watch · RSS · Follow us on X: @Blackoutmap_net

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