Internet services face disruption in Pakistan

Downdetector, which bases its analysis on users’ complaints, also reported disruption in WhatsApp throughout the day [File]
| Photo Credit: REUTERS

Internet users across Pakistan faced disruption in accessing various online platforms on Sunday, according to a media report.

Popular platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok have either been suspended or were operating at reduced speeds, leaving users frustrated with limited access.

Around 52% of the users reported issues in sending messages.

Users in Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad, Peshawar and other parts of the country also reported issues with TikTok and Instagram throughout the day, according to the Dawn newspaper.

People in Pakistan are facing slow internet speed after the government reportedly installed a firewall to monitor anti-state content on social media apps.

The government downplayed the outages, dismissing concerns about the firewall situation as “blown out of proportion.” While speaking to Geo News on Sunday Minister of State for Information Technology and Telecom Shaza Fatima Khawaja said that the situation with the firewall was “blown out of proportion and a web management system has been operating in the country for 10 years.”

“There is nothing controversial about a country working on its cyber security,” she said, adding that the entire world used different cyber security mechanisms.

She said that the security paradigm of the world was shifting towards information and technology (IT) similar to the economic paradigm.

Fatima said that given Pakistan faced “millions of cyber attacks” daily, it was getting increasingly difficult to detect terrorist activity in the country.

At least two online tools have negated the Pakistani government’s claims of uninterrupted internet services.

The Dawn newspaper analysed data from these tools, which track network stability and monitor internet outages in real-time, and found that users were unable to access or had limited access to several social media services on Sunday.

According to Internet Outage Detection and Analysis (IODA), a tool developed by the Internet Intelligence Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology, these disruptions lasted for hours.

The tool, which measures internet connectivity and detects outages “in near real-time”, found that the network remained stable at the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) level throughout the day.

However, despite the stable network, IODA reported disruption in the internet based on its examination of traffic to Google services.

Online tools tracking internet disruptions use traffic to popular websites and services as a benchmark to determine internet stability in a region.

In the case of IODA, it uses traffic headed to Google services — search engine, YouTube, Gmail, etc — from a geographic location as the benchmark to determine any abnormality in internet access.

The issues with accessing Google services, reported by IODA, were also corroborated by another tool, Downdetector.

The tool, which tracks outages of social media websites, reported persistent complaints by users about issues with Gmail and YouTube.

Downdetector, which bases its analysis on users’ complaints, also reported disruption in WhatsApp throughout the day.