After an outage of 39 hours, the services of the popular micro-blogging website X, formerly known as Twitter, have been successfully restored in Pakistan. The outage, which started at 9 p.m. on Saturday, impacted users who reported difficulties accessing tweets and new posts. Attempts to load the site resulted in a ‘this site can’t be reached’ notification. Downdetector.pk, a real-time internet and social media outage monitoring service, recorded at least 185 reports of X outages by 9:01 p.m., with the number increasing to 239 by 9:24 p.m. Users took to social media to express their frustration during the downtime. Cybersecurity watchdog NetBlocks also confirmed the shutdown of X in Pakistan. This incident adds to a series of recent internet service disruptions, including social media sites, in the country. The situation is particularly noteworthy given the ongoing context of the 2024 general elections, where most services have been affected. Notably, X had previously experienced a global outage in May 2023, prompting widespread complaints from users worldwide.

Credit: Independent News Pakistan (INP)