- February 19, 2024
- Kainat Shakeel
- 0
ISLAMABAD: According to Downdetector, Pakistan’s social media site X, formerly known as Twitter, continued to be disrupted on Monday for the third day in a row. When services were finally restored at 12:24 p.m., the outage that had been reported just after 10:30 a.m. continued until noon. But after 1 p.m., disturbances reappeared. Karachi, Rawalpindi, Lahore, and Gujranwala were identified as the most afflicted places by Downdetector, which aggregates status information from multiple sources, including users.
Amidst accusations of election tampering in the polls conducted on February 8, today is X’s third consecutive day of service disruptions. In the wake of a high-level resignation and the public acknowledgment of vote manipulation by former Rawalpindi commissioner Liaqat Ali Chattha, who claimed massive rigging, there has been a nationwide disruption to X, according to internet monitor Netblocks on Saturday.
X was blocked in Pakistan for a full day, according to data provided by Netblocks on Sunday. The website called the restriction “the latest and longest in a series of nation-scale internet censorship measures imposed by authorities as reports of election fraud emerge.” With concerns over blocked VPNs and sluggish internet speeds, digital rights campaigner Usama Khilji pointed out on Sunday that many users could only access X through specific virtual private networks (VPNs). In the meantime, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) denounced the blocking of the internet and social media, claiming that it exacerbates the problems facing an already precarious economy and has a detrimental effect on online businesses and commerce.
Human Rights Campaign Party (HRCP) highlighted that these actions violate peoples’ freedom of expression, access to information, and democratic rights, and they must stop right away. Inquiries over the service outage have been referred to the interior ministry by the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), which has declined to comment.