As per our yesterday’s news regarding the PTCL internet was down.   First everyone thought that it was due to some upgradation of the network. Ufone, a major PTCL customer and a sister concern, was severely impacted as well as its 3G and SMS services went off-air across the country.

PTCL officially told that its due to the multiple cable cuts.

If it was the cable fault then how come the landlines phones were working or PTCL Smart TV was also working. Ufone 2G was also working normally.

Most of the people were not convinced with it just like us.

A CEO of an ISP, who wanted to remain unnamed, ruled out the possibility of a media cut. “It’s for sure not a media cut or fault”, he said.

Pervez Iftikhar said “The dual cuts often spill over into configuration issues at both transport and network layer”

We asked if today’s outage could be due to software misconfiguration, Pervez Iftikhar, former CEO of USF Pakistan, said that he can’t rule out the chances.

Mr. Parvez also stressed that cable cuts have to be at very “strategic” locations that they aggravated the problem in the network to this extent. “If it were indeed multiple cable cuts, then it’s a badly designed network”, he added.

Parvez Iftikhar also said that there is apparently no inter-operator cable swap in place or else this type of outage would never have occurred.

This was the first time the country wide internet was down. There has not been any incident in the past.

Mr. Imran Janjua, General Manager PR at PTCL, in response to our queries, said that PTCL’s network is designed for business continuity and high availability.

“However, due to abnormal cuts in our cables in different remote parts of the country, internet services were impacted which have been fully restored.”

Mr. Janjua further said that a high level investigation committee has been constituted to determine the root cause of the outage.

The investigation is being carried out by PTCL to know the real reasons behind the outage.