ISLAMABAD (AFP/CNN) -- The Pakistani government has ordered all Internet service providers to block the YouTube website for containing blasphemous content and material considered offensive to Islam, officials said Sunday.

An inter-ministerial committee has decided to block YouTube because it contained “blasphemous content, videos and documents,” a government official told AFP.
“The site will remain blocked till further orders,” he said.
Other officials said the site had been blocked because it contained controversial profane sketches of the Holy Prophet (PBUH) which were republished by Danish newspapers earlier this month.
Wahal us Siraj, one of the founders of the Internet Service Providers Association of Pakistan, told CNN Monday that the telecommunications authority sent him a link to a YouTube video that concerned Pakistani authorities. A click on that link Monday yielded a message saying the “video has been removed due to terms of use violation.”
Authorities in Brazil, China, Iran, Morocco, Myanmar, Syria and Thailand have blocked access to YouTube in the last few years, according to Reporters Without Borders, a press advocacy organization.
The countries acted after concluding that YouTube videos were subversive, immoral, embarrassing to well-known figures, the group said.
In Pakistan, a committee made up of representatives from various government ministries ordered the Pakistani Telecommunications Authority to block YouTube access, Mehmood said.
The authority sent a letter to Internet service providers (ISPs) on Friday evening ordering them to prevent people in Pakistan from visiting YouTube, she said.
According to a BBC report, a Pakistani ISP tried to implement the decision not by blocking traffic to the Web site, but by re-directing the address.
While the re-direction of YouTube traffic was only intended for Pakistan, the change was accidentally propagated around the world, the BBC said.
This meant that worldwide traffic to the site was affected on Sunday, with Internet users around the globe unable to connect to the site for almost two hours.
Roughly 3 to 5 million of Pakistan’s 165 million people have Internet access, the Internet Service Providers Association of Pakistan says.