he says in all likelihood, a guy in charge setup a malicious route or "report" saying they could access youtube faster than they really could. which means, everyone trying to get to youtube, went through pakistan because it was the fastest way to youtube. so all youtube traffic went to pakistan, which was the ddos part.
why isn't this a huge problem? it kinda is. the system shouldn't be able to be taken down. But, it isn't a huge problem because nobody actually does this.
Apparently, isps pay a lot for their access, and this kinda thing is a good way of paying a lot more and loosing all your money and not having internet, which is the opposite of the business they are in.
i've never ever heard of something like this happening, or about these 'reports.' so... maybe nobody should listen to me. but my friend is usually right about this stuff.
Each BGP peer announces which set of routes they are the final destination for, e.g. Level3 announces themselves as the final dest for my Class C, 206.192.23.0/24 .
In blocking YouTube, they either meant to be malicious, or, they meant to null-route YouTube inside Pakistan but instead fat-fingered it and issued commands that instead of null-routing, made them the final destination for those YouTube IPs.
Mistake that YouTube made was that this Class C was also where their DNS servers were, so they were unable to redirect people elsewhere once they were aware what was going on (since corrected).
Also see http://www.renesys.com/blog/2008/02/pakistan_hijacks_youtube...
Lately Pakistan has been 'Epic Fail' in general...
Law and technology is rarely good. However, it seems that religion, law and routing tables is a particularly bad combination.
