After recovering for a brief period yesterday, X, formerly known as Twitter has been suspended again for the fourth day in a row. Users are once again having trouble accessing the social media website and app.
Twitter service has been down in Pakistan since February 17. The outage started once the commissioner of Rawalpindi Liaqat Ali Chattha announced that he would surrender to the police.
This was after he admitted to rigging the general elections which took place at the start of the month. He admitted turning winners into losers overnight by tens of thousands of votes. He claimed to have “personally supervised” the alteration of 70,000 votes.
As mentioned earlier, X suspension has now entered its fourth day in Pakistan, marking the longest-ever outage in the country. Website outage tracker Downdetector is once again showing hundreds of disruption reports from all over the country. Users are unable to load their feeds or anything else on their X account.
The decision to suspend X has raised questions about the rationale behind the move, with some speculating about potential political motivations. Meanwhile, concerns have been voiced regarding the impact of the suspension on freedom of expression and access to information in the country.
While the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) is a key regulatory body overseeing telecommunications and digital services, it has chosen to remain neutral on the matter. Sources from the PTA have clarified that the authority played no part in the decision to suspend X in Pakistan.
Responsibility for the suspension has been attributed to the Ministry of Interior, which holds authority over matters related to national security and digital regulations. However, the Ministry has yet to provide detailed explanations or justifications for the ban, leaving users and stakeholders seeking clarity on the issue.
In response to the ban, some social media users have turned to virtual private networks (VPNs) as a means to bypass restrictions and access X’s services.