yelvington.com

YouTube has disappeared from the Internet, apparently the victim of hackers who managed to gain control of its root DNS record[IP routing ... see below for details]. My wife and I were just moments ago watching some videos and suddenly YouTube became unreachable. A whois request for Youtube.com returns this:

Whois Server Version 2.0

Domain names in the .com and .net domains can now be registered
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net
for detailed information.

YOUTUBE.COM.ZZZZZ.GET.LAID.AT.WWW.SWINGINGCOMMUNITY.COM
YOUTUBE.COM.MORE.INFO.AT.WWW.BEYONDWHOIS.COM
YOUTUBE.COM.IS.N0T.AS.1337.AS.WWW.GULLI.COM
YOUTUBE.COM

... and all packets destined for YouTube are disappearing into the network of PCCW Telecom of Hong Kong.

[Update 4:19 PM EST]

YouTube is back on the air now. Others have pointed out that the zzzzz.get.laid and so on citations in the whois registry may not be related to this outage; it's a separate prank. A comment below from OpenDNS points a finger at Pakistan but indicates it may all have been a screwup. Hard to tell. but if you subscribe to the school of thought that says "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity," it does make sense.

[Update 4:58 PM EST]
A post at merit.edu gets into some technical details: It was router poisoning, not DNS (which converts names into numbers that routers can understand). And it is troubling that the infrastructure of the Internet, which is supposed to route around obstructions, turns out to be so fragile.

[Update 5:17 PM EST]
I've changed the headline to reflect that IP addresses, not DNS, were hijacked. It'll be interesting to see if this prompts some reconsideration of how routing data is handled on the Internet. If a rogue participant in the global network can black out a major information resource -- commercial or governmental -- so easily, we have a problem.

Aaron Smith at Pew muses about the effect YouTube is having in the presidential primary race as Barack Obama's powerful Iowa caucuses speech is relayed around the Internet:

"it's likely that relatively few people, outside of the most inveterate political junkies, actually did watch the speech live and in its entirety. And prior to the days of broadband access and easily accessible online video, it's likely that most voters would never have seen more of the speech than an odd clip here or there on the cable and network news shows. Instead, more than 160,000 people have watched just the official campaign YouTube clip alone in the twelve hours since it was posted, in addition to the tens or hundreds of thousands more who watched from other video or news sites."

Things are different this time around. On the one hand, the explosion of media choices has fractured the audience so we have relatively few common experiences. On the other hand, the "word of mouth" power of the Internet allows an occasional experience to spread quickly, based on a chain of recommendations by individuals, not media power brokers.

One of the effects of this transformation is an increased volatility in public opinion. Three or four months ago most pundits claimed, and I tended to agree, that Hilary Clinton was an unstoppable juggernaut.

No longer.

I first encountered this effect in what I consider to be the first major campaign truly altered by the Internet: Jesse Ventura's 1998 election as governor of Minnesota.

Ventura's backers, many of them former Ross Perot followers, were able to connect, organize, recruit and communicate through the Internet in ways that previously had not been possible.

Political parties, pundits and mainstream media were caught off guard by a grassroots process that unfolded under the conventional radar, and Ventura, not taken seriously in the months leading up to the vote, "shocked the world."

In hindsight it was possible to find clues in the raw Minnesota Poll data about the volatility and dissatisfaction with the conventional candidates (Skip Humphrey and Norm Coleman). Lessons from that experience undoubtedly helped the Iowa Poll folks sharpen their pencils and come up with a much more accurate prediction in the final hours before this year's caucuses.

Now we have all sorts of predictions that Obama may become the new juggernaut. Maybe. But keep in mind that public opinion today is more volatile than ever, and a slip or unexpected turn of events could change everything again.

This pretty much sums up the last few years: