Internet slows down after cable fault

Some internet users on Wednesday experienced downgraded speeds after reports of a fault in one of the international submarine cables – the SMW5 – while major social media services also experienced a brief outage.

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) said that the internet service providers (ISPs) across Pakistan have been notified by the PTCL that an outage has occurred in one of the international upstream networks once again.

"Standard arrangements to provide uninterrupted internet services to the users have been futile so far, with eastbound traffic impacted heavily due to pending issues that are still unresolved," a report by ProPakistani added.

As per the latest update, upstream degradation happened after multiple international cables (MENA, AAE-1 & SMW5) were broken in Egypt's terrestrial segment.

Meta apps outage

Meanwhile, major social media services including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp also experienced a brief outage but returned online after users across the country reported problems.

Meta — the company that owns these social media applications — has yet to address the matter.

Downdetector, which tracks outages by gathering status reports from several sources including user-submitted errors on its platform, also reported that the social media platforms were down after 5pm.

After hundreds of complaints regarding connectivity and logging into accounts on Twitter, some users reported that they were now able to send and receive messages on WhatsApp.

The outage was reported only two days after Instagram faced a worldwide outage. Many users faced problems logging into their accounts and accessing social media applications.

Instagram Comms, the app’s PR agency, later said on Twitter that a “bug was causing people in different parts of the world to have issues accessing their accounts and caused a temporary change for some in number of followers”.

The Meta-owned organisation said on Monday that it was looking into an issue that prevented thousands of its users from accessing the photo-sharing platform, with several of them complaining about their accounts being suspended.

Last week, WhatsApp was down for two hours in a global outage. WaBetaInfo, an online platform that tracks updates to WhatsApp, said the outage was caused due to server issues.