Pakistan Telecommunications Limited (PTCL) announced on Saturday that cuts to submarine Internet cables in Saudi waters can affect Internet services in the country during peak hours.
In a shared statement in X, the telecommunications giant said that submarine cable cuts near the Saudi capital Jeddah had affected the partial bandwidth networks SMW4 (South Asia-Middle East-West Asia) and IMEWE (India-Middle East-Western Europe).
“Internet users in Pakistan can experience some service degradation during peak hours,” said PTCL’s statement. “Our international partners are working on the priority to solve the problem, while our local teams actively organize the alternative bandwidth to minimize the impact.”
The Ministry of Information Technology has not yet issued any declaration on development.
This is not the first time that the damage to the submarine cables of the Internet has affected the services in Pakistan.
Internet users throughout Pakistan complained of slow Internet and hindered access to services throughout 2024. On January 3 of this year, PTCL said the teams were “diligently” working to solve the issue of interruptions facing users after a failure in the AAE-1 submarine cable that connected to Pakistan decreased the speed of the network in the country.
On January 16, PTCL announced that Internet services were “now completely operational” after the complete restoration of the Asia-Africa-Europe-1 submarine cable (AAE-1).
