Pakistani internet disrupted by submarine cable fault, In a statement on Tuesday, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) said the internet slowdowns and degradations of services over the past few days have been attributed to a fault in one of the seven international submarine cables connecting Pakistan with the rest of the world.
There was a clarification following the ongoing internet slowdown that experts and stakeholders attributed to a purported attempt to tighten up social media by enforcing a firewall that controls the flow of unwanted content to a wider audience via social media platforms, as well as cutting off unauthorized broadcasts of the content.
AAE-1 cable has experienced a 250G outage due to a rerouting between Iran and Qatar, which has caused the cable to experience an outage,” the telecommunications authority announced in an official statement.
PTA said a similar incident occurred near Karachi where the SMW 4 cable (1.5T) was out of service as a result of faults. The statement further stated that operators were rerouting traffic on other available cables in Pakistan to “minimise the impact on internet users in the country”.
A statement from the PTA concluded, “The relevant departments have been instructed to fix the issue, and the PTA will monitor the situation until the speed of internet is normalised in the country.”
There was a day earlier that the head of the PTA, Major General (Retd) Hafeezur Rehman, admitted that the National Firewall System (NFS) or Web Management System (WMS) would be upgraded for the purpose of controlling or removing information from social media. He cited orders from the executive or court to support this claim.
That in March 2019, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), which governed the country at that time, had approved PC-1 for the upgrade of the NFS. According to him, social media messaging service X, previously known as Twitter, has been banned from operating in the country after failing to comply with the instructions issued by the interior ministry, because there is a defined mechanism to impose a ban or delete content on social media under the law of the land.
A PTA spokesman said that under the Web Management System, PTA has the duty to comply with any order issued by the high court or executive branch, and cited examples where the company removed items such as pornography or blasphemy from the website.
There was, however, a unanimous vote in the Standing Committee on Information Technology of the National Assembly to reject any move to slow down the internet or ban social media platforms. They instructed the Ministry of Information Technology to work in collaboration with them in order to determine the exact number of loss faced by the IT sector.
The Pakistan Internet and Wireless Service Providers Association (WISPAP), the Pakistan Software Houses Association (P@SHA) and the IT industry as a whole have expressed their displeasure with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s government over this issue, citing the negative economic impact it has on freelancers, IT professionals, and the digital economy in general.
It has been estimated by P@SHA that the businesses will suffer a loss of $300 million, as a result of their complaints and their reputations being damaged. According to WISPAP Chairman Shahzad Arshad, companies and individuals who rely on reliable internet connectivity, which is a cornerstone of the country’s digital economy, are now having trouble maintaining operations due to the slowdown, which threatens to threaten their very existence.
Despite that, the government declined to take responsibility for the issue, with State Minister for Information Technology, Shaza Fatima Khawaja, blaming the use of virtual private networks (VPNs) by internet users for the fact that “their phones” were experiencing slowdowns.
The Pakistani government never blocked the internet or slowed it down, and I swear, as I spoke with the media last week, that the internet was not slowed down by the government.
Timenews1 provided that news.
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