PTA chairman blames Pakistan’s internet slowdown to ‘faulty submarine cable’

After several days of internet disruption and fear of billions of losses on account of slowdown in services, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has attributed the development to a “faulty submarine cable”, Aaj News reported.

PTA Chairman Major General Hafeezur Rehman (retd) stated this during a meeting of the National Assembly’s Standing Committee on IT on Wednesday.

He said that no firewalls were being installed, adding that that it was the government’s web management system which was being upgraded.

“The internet slowdown in the country is due to a faulty submarine cable, which is expected to be repaired by August 28,” he told the committee.

His remarks come after the nation saw massive disruption in internet services, while X (formerly Twitter) remains blocked in the country for almost six months.

Since July, internet networks have been up to 40 percent slower than normal, according to one IT association, while documents, images and voice notes have been disrupted on WhatsApp, used by tens of millions of people.

Digital rights experts had stated that government is testing a firewall – a security system that monitors network traffic but can also be used to control online spaces

On August 15, the National Assembly’s Standing Committee on IT sought an explanation from the PTA chairman and asked Rehman to provide reasons behind the disruption in social media services.

On Sunday, State Minister of Information Technology and Telecommunication Shaza Fatima Khawaja categorically dismissed reports that the government was throttling the internet, stressing that the state was neither slowing down its speed nor shutting it down.

The report of the government throttling internet is wrong,“ she stated at a press conference in Islamabad on Sunday.

“Some services of a few apps was (affected) because those services weren’t being downloaded. So a big chunk of the population started to operate on Virtual Private Networks (VPNs).”

She then explained that the higher usage of VPNs for bypassing Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) and connecting directly to live servers places additional strain on those servers, which may ultimately slow down the internet.