Internet services in Pakistan restored after hours-long nationwide disruption
Representative image of a modem.
Internet services in Pakistan were restored late Saturday (Jan 20) after they were disrupted for hours. In a post on X, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) said, "The recent disruption in internet services was caused by a technical fault, which has been promptly rectified. Internet services have been fully restored nationwide."
The nationwide outage came as jailed former prime minister Imran Khan's party- the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) was holding a virtual rally just weeks ahead of the general election. This was the second outage in two weeks coinciding with online campaign events organised by the PTI.
"We can confirm the nation-scale restriction of social media platforms across Pakistan," said Alp Toker, Director of the Netblocks watchdog organisation monitoring cybersecurity and internet governance, tonews agency AFPon Saturday.
Also read |Pakistan strikes Iran targeting Baluch separatist group: Who are the Baluch, what are their issues?
Toker added the outage was remarkably systematic" and "consistent with previous restrictions imposed during PTI events".
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Citing data, a report by Geo News said there was a sharp rise in connection outages on YouTube, X, and Facebook. Internet users in Pakistan's major cities including Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Sargodha, and Attock reported complaints about facing difficulties in accessing social media sites, the report said.
Last week, internet services and popular social media apps were hit by outages almost across the country. A similar situation was seen on Dec 17 last year, with users reporting outages on Facebook, YouTube, and X.
(With inputs from agencies)