South Asia Investor Review

Pakistan is responsible for almost total blackout of YouTube, the popular video site, around the world. The BBC is reporting that the hour-long global outage was almost certainly connected to Pakistan Telecom and Asian internet service provider PCCW. The BBC News website's technology editor, Darren Waters, says that to block Pakistan's citizens from accessing YouTube it is believed Pakistan Telecom "hijacked" the web server address of the popular video site. In the last couple of days, the Pakistan Telecom Authority was being attacked by the bloggers and others in Pakistan for attempting to block anti-government video content. Some believed it had to with alleged "election rigging" by MQM. In fact, the motivation was to block access to material deemed offensive to Muslims. It is thought that, unlike the filters in China and Saudi Arabia, Pakistani filters lack the ability to stop content selectively and block the entire domains instead. A leading net profes...

Internet services have been disrupted in parts of the Middle East after damage to an undersea cable in the Mediterranean. There was disruption to 70% of the nationwide network in Egypt, a government official told Reuters. There was also disruption in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, reported the Associated Press. India also suffered up to 60% disruption, a national industry body told Reuters news agency. Blogger Masud Reza from Pakistan is reporting that Pakistan is also affected by this outage. Mesud's post says: "At approx. 11:30am today, the SMW4 Segment 4 Sumbarine Cable went down due to a fiber cut between Marseille and Palermo due to which the Internet connectivity in Pakistan is severely affected. At this moment, TWA1 customers are suffering the most. PTCL has switched it's Internet traffic from SMW4 to SMW3. Let's hope that this fault is repaired soon since degraded Internet service cripples internet for business. Update: A ship has lef...