When Pakistan Accidentally Took Down YouTube: The Fragile Trust Model of BGP
On February 24, 2008, at 18:47 UTC, Pakistan Telecom (AS17557) started announcing a more specific route to YouTube’s IP prefix: 208.65.153.0/24. Within minutes, YouTube traffic from around the world was being redirected to Pakistan. The Pakistan government had ordered the ISP to block YouTube domestically, but a configuration error caused the route to propagate globally through PCCW Global (AS3491), their upstream provider. YouTube engineers responded approximately 80 minutes later by announcing even more specific routes (/25 prefixes) to reclaim their traffic. By 21:01 UTC, the hijack was over. But for nearly two hours, a single misconfiguration in one country had effectively stolen one of the world’s most popular websites. ...