YouTube, the Google-owned site, said Pakistan is to blame after access to its site on Sunday was left disrupted for two hours.

The incident, which is still being investigated by YouTube, came after the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority ordered 70 Pakistani Internet service providers to block access to YouTube.com on Friday, because of anti-Islamic movies on the video-sharing site. The service providers said the action was to immediate and could trigger riots.

A senior official at the PTA contacted YouTube, requesting the video to be removed, arguing the clip was a violation of YouTube's terms of service, which ban hate speech. YouTube has since removed the clip.

The block was intended to cover only Pakistan, but extended to about two-thirds of the global Internet population, starting at 1:47 p.m. EST Sunday, the Associated Press reported.

We are investigating and working with others in the Internet community to prevent this from happening again, YouTube said in an e-mailed statement.

The clip in question featured several minutes of a film made by a Dutch politician Geert Wilders, whose outspoken comments against Islam have made him a target of protests and outrage in the Muslim world. According to Mr. Wilders's own Web site, his film portrays the Koran as a fascist book that incites people to murder. Mr. Wilders has previously compared the Koran to Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf.

Although less than 5 percent of Pakistan's citizens are connected to the Internet, the government feared the film could spark riots similar to the deadly violence that broke out in the Muslim world after a Danish newspaper published a cartoon about the prophet Mohammed in 2006.

Pakistan YouTube