By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s main telecommunications provider said on Saturday that cuts to submarine internet cables in Saudi waters could disrupt services in the country during peak hours, the latest in a series of undersea faults to hit the nation’s connectivity.
Pakistan Telecommunications Limited (PTCL) said in a statement shared on X that the submarine cable cuts near the Saudi capital Jeddah had impacted the partial bandwidth capacity of the SMW4 (South Asia-Middle East-West Asia) and IMEWE (India-Middle East-Western Europe) networks.
“Internet users in Pakistan may experience some service degradation during peak hours,” the PTCL statement read. “Our international partners are working on priority to resolve the issue while our local teams are actively arranging alternative bandwidth to minimise the impact.”
This is not the first time that damage to undersea internet cables has affected services in Pakistan. Internet users across Pakistan complained of slow internet and hindered access to services throughout 2024. On January 3 this year, PTCL said teams were “diligently” working to resolve the matter of disruptions faced by users after a fault in the AAE-1 subsea internet cable connecting Pakistan slowed down the network speed in the country.
On January 16, PTCL announced that internet services were “now fully operational” after the complete restoration of the Asia-Africa-Europe-1 (AAE-1) undersea internet cable.
Outage reports spiked on Saturday morning, according to data from Down Detector, which showed disruptions building up overnight before a surge in complaints by 9am. At least 16 reports of outage were seen on the graph at 10:09am.
Earlier this year, the Africa-1 submarine cable was linked to country internet infrastructure. The 10,000-kilometre-long cable, with high transmission capacity, connects the country to Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt and France. The project, approved by PTCL’s Board of Directors in November 2020 at a cost of $59.5 million, is expected to be ready for service by the first quarter of 2026.
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