YouTube back on in Pakistan

Pakistan has lifted a ban it imposed on YouTube on Sunday, YouTube has said.

The ban was reportedly imposed by the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) on Sunday in response both to a film preview by Dutch MP Geert Wilders, which some Muslims may have found offensive, and in reaction to protests against Danish publications reprinting cartoons that some Muslims found controversial.

A YouTube spokesperson said on Wednesday: "We are pleased to confirm that YouTube is again accessible in Pakistan." The spokesperson declined to comment as to why the ban had been lifted.

The ban had the side effect of knocking YouTube off the Internet for two hours on Sunday said YouTube owner Google, which blamed the outage on traffic being routed via "erroneous protocols".

"For about two hours [on Sunday], traffic to YouTube was routed according to erroneous Internet protocols, and many users around the world could not access our site," said a Google spokesperson. "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."

The results of the Google investigation are unlikely to be made public, according to the Google spokesperson.

However, there are different reports as to the cause of the outage. The BBC reported that Hong Kong-based Internet protocol backbone company PCCW, which provides upstream Internet access to many of Pakistan's ISPs, had "leaked" details of the ban to ISPs around the world, which had then mistakenly blocked YouTube.