The widespread social media site X, formerly known as Twitter, has reportedly been “restricted” in Pakistan for 24 hours, NetBlocks said on Sunday, as users across the nation faced hours-long inaccessibility of the platform.
The microblogging site became inaccessible to thousands of users, for the second time in a day, as intermittent problems while loading X had been reported since yesterday (Saturday).
The cyber security watchdog said: “metrics showed that X/Twitter has now been restricted in Pakistan for 24 hours”, which according to NetBlocks was the longest in a series of countrywide internet outages.
Earlier, Downdetector cited at least 16 reports of potential issues on X all over the country around 4:45 pm, which later soared to 83 at some point.
As per the real-time internet and social media outage and monitoring service, users on X were unable to view posts on the social media site as the message “this site can’t be reached” appeared whenever they tried to load it.
Most people in Pakistan blamed the authority for this outage as, the commissioner of Rawalpindi, Liaqat Ali Chattha, said he would hand himself over to police after admitting he helped to manipulate election results and “personally supervised” the switching of 70,000 votes—”we converted the losers into winners,” he reportedly said.
The country has been facing frequent internet and social media site outages recently, especially for a couple of months during the ongoing situation in the wake of the general election of 2024.
The netizens complained about their inability to connect to X for hours on Saturday night.
Moreover, the country witnessed disruptions on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, streaming giant YouTube, Google services as well as internet service provider PTCL last month.
Individually, X was hit by global outages in May 2023, after a huge number of complaints were been submitted by users across the world.
