Daily Times

Pakistan Telecommunication Company Ltd (PTCL) announced on Friday that its teams were actively working to resolve disruptions affecting users since the previous night.

The issues arose due to a fault in one of the subsea internet cables connecting Pakistan, which resulted in slower network speeds across the country.

In its statement, PTCL confirmed the issue and stated that its teams were working diligently to resolve the problem. The company acknowledged that users may experience slow browsing speeds and apologized for the inconvenience caused.

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) on Thursday confirmed that the fault occurred in the Asia-Africa-Europe-1 (AAE-1) cable, located near Qatar. The AAE-1 cable, which has been in operation since 2017, connects multiple countries, including Pakistan, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, India, Oman, the UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Greece, Italy, and France.

Pakistan has one of the slowest internet in the world despite improvement in average mobile and fixed broadband speeds in October, according to global speed test data.

On Wednesday, members of the Senate Standing Committee on Information Technology raised concerns about the practice of shutting down internet services, particularly after receiving directives from the interior ministry. However, the PTA chairman responded that such shutdowns had been a recurring issue since 2016 but were recently deemed unlawful, and added that the interior ministry must provide final legal opinions on the matter.