YouTube DNS Hijacked?

I was starting to write a couple posts for PuppetVision this afternoon when I noticed that YouTube was either unreachable or offline. I did some quick sleuthing and discovered that YouTube appears to have had it’s DNS record hijacked.

The DNS system is responsible for (among other things) translating human-readable URLs (e.g. www.example.com) into IP addresses (e.g. 208.66.188.165). Without a secure DNS system the internet becomes nearly impossible to navigate. The idea that hackers could do this is to a Google owned site is pretty scary considering how many people and businesses rely on Google services like YouTube, Blogger, etc.

Update: Apparently, this is much ado about nothing. According to Android Apps, YouTube was briefly down because Google was updating it to support Adsense for video, not because of some kind of hacker attack. Other people say the outage was related a technical foul-up after Pakistan blocked access to the site. Either way, YouTube is back up and running.