Internet services were briefly disrupted in parts of the country on Tuesday, according to Downdetector.
Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from several sources including users, earlier showed that users reported issues with the services of three internet service providers — Pakistan Telecommunication Company Ltd (PTCL), Transworld Home, and Nayatel — shortly after noon.
Around 4pm, the internet tracker showed that user reports indicated no current problems with the latter two and possible problems with PTCL.
Internet monitor Netblocks also reported the disruption followed by the recovery. It said operators had attributed the disturbance to a “technical issue”.
For PTCL, users had reported a disruption in services primarily from Lahore, Karachi and Rawalpindi. For Transworld Home, issues were earlier reported from Lahore, Karachi, Rawalpindi and Peshawar. For Nayatel, users had reported issues from Rawalpindi, Lahore and near Okara.
In an email to customers, which was seen by Dawn.com, Transworld Home said that there was an “unexpected nationwide outage affecting internet services in Pakistan”.
“Our team is currently investigating the issue and we will resume services completely once the outage has been resolved,” it said as it apologised for the disruption.
Today’s disruption came as access to social media platform X has been largely disrupted in the country since February 17, after former commissioner Rawalpindi Liaquat Ali Chatta made a statement in front of the media claiming that the “elections were rigged”.
On the day of the general elections, the the-n caretaker government had suspended mobile phone and data services nationwide, despite Pakistan Telecommunication Authority’s earlier assurances of uninterrupted internet access.
In January, services of social media platforms were disrupted during online events hosted by the PTI. The then-caretaker government had blamed “technical” issues and system installations for the internet outages, saying that there was “no guarantee” that such incidents won’t occur in the future.