ONDON — Pakistan’s attempts to block users in the country from accessing anti-Islamic content on YouTube may have been behind a near-global outage on the vidclip site Sunday.

Google, the owners of YouTube, released a statement reading, “Many users around the world could not access our site. 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.”

Service was reportedly restored after YouTube engineers contacted staff at Pakistan Telecom and Internet service provider PCCW, whose attempts to block domestic users from accessing the web inadvertently routed global YouTube traffic to “erroneous Internet protocols,” added the Google statement.

The outage lasted approximately two hours.

It is unclear exactly which content had been deemed offensive, although reports suggest it may have been a trailer of right-wing Dutch politico Geert Wilders’ forthcoming anti-Islam short film or reproductions of the now-infamous Danish cartoons lampooning the Prophet Mohammed.

YouTube has fallen foul of political censors in a number of countries in the past, including Thailand, Brazil and Turkey.

© Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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