How Pakistan Accidentally Broke the Internet

Last week, a Pakistani ISP blocked YouTube in response to a video that apparently involved a cartoon pig defecating on the word “Allah.” Fine, whatever—there clearly is no appreciation of Trey Parker and Matt Stone in Islamabad. But the way they did it, which involved replicating a nasty redirect up the chain to several root-level domain name servers, had a cascading effect that overwhelmed their servers and brought the Internet to a crawl. Naturally, it makes more sense as a video: