A major order has been issued by the Sindh High Court (SHC), requiring all individuals to have constant access to the internet until the general elections on February 8.
The high court expressly forbade the government from suspending internet services in an order it issued on Wednesday. The pertinent parties have also been told to submit their answers by January 29.
The persistent problem of internet service suspensions throughout the nation was brought to the attention of the SHC via a petition, which was initiated by Jibran Nasir, a human rights activist and advocate.
Politicians are ramping up their campaigns ahead of next month’s elections, which will take place; therefore, customers have been experiencing frequent internet outages lately. Notably, on January 20, there was another instance of social media network disruptions that especially affected Facebook, X, Instagram, and YouTube.
The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) ascribed the statewide internet outage to a “technical fault” within its optic fibre network, following a significant interruption that transpired only last week.
In a statement on X that was made public, the PTA stated the following:
The recent disruption in internet services was caused by a technical fault, which has been promptly rectified. Internet services have been fully restored nationwide.
According to reports from the worldwide online outage tracker DownDetector, the outage had an effect on PTCL’s operations in addition to those of Google services.
Jibran Nasir, an advocate, drew attention to the fact that Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf’s (PTI) recent election campaigns have been subject to outages and that the party had to be given a fair chance at the impending general activities.
