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Visualising The YouTube Pakistan Outage

There is a good post by bluesky74656 detailing how you you can get a pretty cool representation of the BGP routing mess that took out YouTube for anywhere up to 2/3 for the world. I’ve reproduced the post here:

Head over to this site. It visualizes the BGP routes between different AS’s. Click ‘Start BGPlay’. The prefix in which YouTube lives is 208.65.153.0/24. Set the start time for about 24 Feb 2008 10:00, and the end time for about 25 Feb 2008 03:00 (times are UTC). Start the simulation.

You’ll see a bunch of ASNs. Two have red circles around them. You can get their name by clicking on the number. On the left is YouTube, and on the right is Pakistan Telcom. Click play and watch what happens.

For those too lazy to actually watch this: All the routes destined for YouTube head towards Pakistan Telcom instead. Then, midway through, you see PCCW get wise and shut down those routes, and everyone slowly starts finding the actual YouTube. It’s pretty neat to watch.

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