YouTube recently had an outage that was related to Pakistan. Sound a bit odd? It's also a good story to understand a little bit about routing in the Internet and how it can go wrong. Basically, in an effort to prevent Pakistanis from being able to get to the YouTube website, the powers-that-be inserted a false entry into the Pakistani routers, which indicated the YouTube address was within the Pakistani network. Anyone in Pakistan trying to access that address would have their traffic routed to this bogus location, where a bogus Web server would announce that the service was not available. To pull this off they had to advertise a very specific route. In IP, the most specific route always wins, which produced the effect they were looking for. Unfortunately, they didn't keep the route to themselves. Using BGP, they passed it on to other ISPs, and it quickly made Pakistan the preferred route to YouTube. In today's PodSnack, Trevor and I talk you through what happened and the effect.

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