YouTube disappeared from the internet for between 1-2 hours today, according to reader reports and others.

YouTube went down around 11:30am PST and came back some time later.

The interesting side of the outage is an allegation from OpenDNS that Pakistan Telecom hijacked YouTube’s IP address space resulting in a worldwide outage. They note that the issue was subsequently rectified by PCCW, but it raises the question: is it really that easy to take one of the largest destinations online down?

There is no official word from YouTube as yet on the cause of the downtime.

(thanks to Mauricio Idarraga for the tip)