WhatsApp Disruption in Pakistan: True Reason Confirmed, Minister’s Claim False

Meta Platform Inc. which owns WhatsApp, confirmed that there is no global outage or slowdown of WhatsApp services while talking to Geo News. The confirmation falsified federal Minister for Information Attaullah Tarar’s claim of global technological outage as the cause of WhatsApp disruption in Pakistan. On July 21, during a press conference, the Minister said,

“Listen, the internet has been down in many countries. Flight operations were also affected in America. This has nothing to do with the government. That is an overall problem with the internet as per my knowledge.”

On the other hand, the national telecom regulator, Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) defined the problem as a “technical glitch.”

It shows that the PTA issued a misleading statement, while the minister made a false claim about the disruption of WhatsApp in Pakistan.

Digital rights activists presumed that the WhatsApp disruption could be because of the government’s installation of a firewall to regulate social media.  However, Meta Platforms Inc. has now confirmed that the WhatsApp disruption was mainly because of Pakistan’s internet infrastructure.

The global technological outage took place on July 19, because of a faulty software update published by the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike. The issue was resolved in just a few hours and only affected the company’s customers running Microsoft Windows. On the other hand, WhatsApp users in Pakistan began to report difficulties in transferring videos, audio, and photos from July 17. Even as of today, many users in Pakistan are facing disruption in WhatsApp.

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