Pakistan: X services down for third day following Rawalpindi ex-police chief's press meet

Services of social media platform X, formerly Twitter, remained disrupted for the third consecutive day in Pakistan on Monday, 19 February.

As per Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from several sources, including users, Karachi, Rawalpindi, Lahore and Gujranwala, among others, are the most-affected areas, Dawn reported.

The disruption makes it the third consecutive day when X services have been affected amid allegations of rigging in the 8 February general elections polls.

On Saturday, internet monitor Netblocks had reported a nationwide disruption to X “amid escalating unrest and protests over allegations of election fraud, following a high-level resignation and public admission of vote manipulation by a senior election official”, the report said.

The outage was reported after former Rawalpindi commissioner Liaqat Ali Chattha, in an explosive press conference, accused the Election Commission of Pakistan and chief justice Qazi Faez Isa of involvement in “rigging” — a claim denied by the electoral watchdog and the top judge.

Chattha had claimed that the candidates who were “losing” the elections “were made to win” and that the process to justify the manipulated results was still going in “an organised manner at some offices”, Dawn reported.

On Sunday, Netblocks said its metrics showed that X had been restricted in Pakistan for 24 hours, and called it “the latest and longest in a series of nation-scale internet censorship measures imposed by authorities as reports of election fraud emerge”.