Internet services disrupted across Pakistan as cables go offline.

Byline: Ramsha Jahangir

KARACHI -- As the world observed the International Internet Day on Tuesday, Pakistan faced a countrywide disruption in internet services following a fault in its submarine cables.

'We regret to inform you that due to international submarine cable fault, interAAnet services are impaActed across Pakistan,' the Pakistan TeleAcommuniAcaAtion Company Limited (PTCL) said in a post on Twitter.

PTCL's spokesperson Fariha Tahir Shah said customers might experience slow browsing but technical teams were working on fully restoring internet services in the shortest possible time. 'PTCL sincerely regArets this temporary inconvenience caused to valued customers, under the prevalent circumstances,' the spokesperson added.

The Pakistan TelecomAmunication Authority (PTA) in a statement said: 'Due to a fault in international submarine cables at around 5pm today, users can face some problems in internet browsing quality. The PTCL is working with international consortiums to rectify the fault and to determine the cause and exact location of the fault occurred.'

Both PTA and PTCL did not confirm how long it would take to restore internet services in the country.

Multiple users said they were experiencing slow browsing. Storm Fiber sent out an alert to its customers explaining that 'you may face degradation on internet services and variation in latency to different destinations'.

'We are receiving complaints of slow browsing from across the country. We received an update from our upstream providers that they have been observing outages on multiple submarine cables. We are coordinating with PTA to resolve the problem at the earliest,' a Storm Fiber customer representative told Dawn. According to a ProPakistani report, two submarine cables had gone offline. 'IMEWE and SEAMEWE 4, that carry almost 50 per cent of...