X’s 36-Hour Blackout And Its Role In Election Integrity Protests

X’s 36-Hour Blackout And Its Role In Election Integrity Protests The microblogging site X, previously known as Twitter, experienced a partial restoration of its services in Pakistan on Monday, following a disruption that lasted for approximately 40 hours.

The X services experienced an outage nationwide starting from 9pm on February 17 due to ongoing protests in the country over suspected election fraud.The services were reinstated for thirty minutes yesterday, only to be interrupted once more after thirty minutes.

The social media platform outage has not been addressed officially by the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA).Pakistan has experienced multiple instances of internet and social media disruption in the past few days. The suspension of internet and mobile services during the general election on February 8th was justified by security concerns.

Pakistan continues to face difficulties with internet connectivity even a week after the general elections. X, previously identified as Twitter, has been inaccessible in the nation for more than 36 hours following the confession by the Rawalpindi commissioner of election manipulation. The outage began on February 17th at 10 pm and briefly returned to normalcy for 30 minutes yesterday. Nevertheless, it is still unavailable today.

The announcement was made by Liaqat Ali Chattha, the commissioner of Rawalpindi, on Saturday, expressing his decision to turn himself in to the police.X’s 36-Hour Blackout And Its Role In Election Integrity Protests. He admitted his complicity in tampering with the election outcomes and asserted that he had personally overseen the modification of 70,000 votes, affirming, “We transformed the unsuccessful candidates into victors.”

NetBlocks, a cyber security watchdog, has reported that X/Twitter has been restricted in Pakistan for a period of 24 hours. This outage represents the longest in a series of countrywide restrictions, as stated by NetBlocks.

Furthermore, in the previous month, the nation encountered disruptions across multiple platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, the streaming platform YouTube, Google services, and the internet service provider PTCL.

The country has experienced regular interruptions in internet and social media platforms in the recent period, especially in the last few months due to the current situation after the 2024 national election.

Users were vocal about their extended difficulty in accessing X on Saturday evening.