On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 12:57 AM, David Monniaux David.Monniaux@free.fr wrote:
It is actually true that some ISP have mistakenly blocked all accesses to Wikimedia sites.
We have received a complaint to that effect on OTRS, from a ISP technician. It seems that their upstream provider screwed up their redirection hacks (using BGP) and mistakenly propagated them to its clients.
I was aware of that. I didn't consider it the same.
For those unaware of how this works: The participating ISPs re-announce one of Wikimedia's IPs in their own networks in order to hijack all the connections. Normally these reannouncments are not distributed outside of the providers network. But mistakes can be made. This is how, a few months ago, Pakistan managed to knock youtube off the internet.
A single configuration glitch from one of these blocking ISPs may have the same effect.