On Sunday, Google’s owned YouTube went down for about an hour, from 11:30am PST to around 12:24 PST. According to BBC News and OpenDNS, the outage of YouTube could be related to Pakistan’s decision to block the access of its citizens to the video-sharing site.

Darren Waters, the BBC News' technology editor, and David Ulevitch, OpenDNS CEO, believe that the Pakistan Telecom "hijacked" the web server address of the popular video site. Pakistan Telecom passed the details to the country's Internet service providers in order to redirect the queries to YouTube to another address.

But "the Asian ISP PCCW leaked the details into the Internet and as a result YouTube YouTube was mistakenly blocked by internet service providers around the world”, BBC News explained.

However, a government official told the AFP that the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority ordered the ban due to "blasphemous content, videos and documents" that are posted on YouTube.

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority asked the country’s 70 Internet service providers to block the popular website until further orders, the Associated Press said.

It is believed that the ban could be related to a movie trailer for an upcoming film by Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders, who has said he plans to release an anti-Quran movie.

Also, it is very probable that the authorities have decided to ban access to YouTube because of a videoclip that shows the cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad published in Danish newspapers in 2005 and earlier this month, Reuters noted.

Several Danish newspapers decided to republish the pictures after the police uncovered a plot to kill the cartoonist.

This is not the first time when access to YouTube is blocked by a certain country. Last month, YouTube was banned by a Turkish court, due to some video that allegedly sent out insults to the country's founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

According to Turkey’s legislation, insulting Mustafa Kemal Ataturk or “Turkishness” is an imprisonable offense.

Last year in March, YouTube faced a similar situation, when Turkey banned the access to video website because of clips that described Mustafa Kemal Ataturk as a homosexual. YouTube responded by removing the offending videos and Turkey lifted its ban two days later by order of an Istanbul court.

Besides Turkey, Thailand is another country that banned access to YouTube after a video insulting Thai King Bhumibol Adulyadej was posted in April 2007 on the site. Thailand lifted the ban four months later, in August 2007.