By Staff Reporter
KARACHI: Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) said on Friday that its websites were blocked in the country ahead of the February 8 general elections, and demanded an explanation from the authorities.
The party, which lost its trademark ‘bat’ symbol on violating rules of intraparty polls, has fielded its candidates as independents with different symbols. To help voters identify them, it launched an online portal on its website insaf.pk, as well as a backup site, pticandidates.com.
It also introduced a feature whereby voters can message on Khan’s official Facebook account to get information about PTI-backed candidates.
But on Friday, many people reported that they could not access the PTI’s websites through Wi-Fi or mobile data, except when using a Virtual Private Network (VPN), which allows users to bypass internet censorship.
The party’s official Twitter account tagged the official handles of the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), the interim information minister Murtaza Solangi and the interim IT minister Umar Saif, and asked them to explain why the websites were blocked.
“People are still getting symbol information from Imran Khan’s Facebook page so the question is what purpose is this block serving?” the party tweeted.
Jibran Ilyas, a member of the PTI’s social media team, also questioned Saif on Twitter, asking, “Can you tell Pakistanis why the websites of [the] country’s most popular political party [are] blocked by you?”
The issue comes after a fake web portal, mimicking the one launched by the PTI, emerged and was found to be providing incorrect information to voters.
The party also faced multiple internet outages in recent weeks that coincided with its online events. On January 20, internet services were disrupted an hour before the PTI’s “virtual power show”, a live broadcast of Khan’s speech to supporters across the country.
Similar disruptions were reported on December 17 and January 7 as well, leading the party to urge the Supreme Court to take notice of the internet suspension.
Global internet monitor Netblocks said its live metrics showed a “nation-scale disruption to social media platforms across #Pakistan, including X/Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.”
“The incident comes as persecuted opposition leader Imran Khan’s political party, PTI, launches its second virtual gathering,” Netblocks said on X.
Netblocks also confirmed a Pakistan-wide disruption to social media platforms during the PTI’s election fundraising telethon on Jan. 7.
The interim government, which took over in August after the previous administration completed its term, blamed “technical” issues and system installations for the outages.
Earlier this week, information minister Solangi said that there was “no guarantee” that such incidents would not occur in the future.
In the same press conference, PTA Director General Ahmed Shamim Pirzada attributed the outages to “technical glitches” and system upgrades. “You can face this for the next two to three months,” he warned.
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