Islamabad:
Ahead of the general elections on February 8, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) on Friday said its websites had been 'blocked' in Pakistan as it called for a response from federal authorities, Dawn reported. Deprived of its 'bat' symbol for the upcoming elections, the PTI has fielded its leaders as independent candidates with different election symbols, the report said.
To address confusion among voters and ease access to poll-related information, the PTI launched an online portal on its website and a backup site. According to Dawn, the party has also introduced a feature that allows voters to message Imran Khan's official Facebook account to get information about PTI-backed candidates.
PTI wondered why his websites have been blocked in Pakistan in a post shared on The party's official X account tagged the official handles of the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), Pakistan's Interim Information Minister Murtaza Solangi and Interim IT Minister Umar Saif.
The party asked, “Can you please explain why PTI's websites are being blocked in Pakistan?” It further wondered, “People are still getting symbol information from Imran Khan's Facebook page, so the question is what purpose does this block serve?”
Jibran Ilyas, member of PTI's social media team, also tagged Saif in his post and asked, “Can you tell Pakistanis why the websites of [the] the most popular political party in the country [are] blocked by you?”
Notably, multiple internet outages have been observed across Pakistan to coincide with the party's online events. On January 20, internet services were disrupted an hour before Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf's 'virtual power show', Dawn reported.
Before that, similar internet disruptions were also reported on December 17 and January 7, leading the party to urge the Supreme Court to take notice of the internet suspension.
Pakistan's interim government blamed “technical” issues and system installations for the disruptions. Earlier this week, Information Minister Solangi had said there was “no guarantee” that such incidents would not occur in the future.
In the same press conference, PTA Director General Ahmed Shamim Pirzada said “technical difficulties” and system upgrades were behind the outages. He had said, 'You can face this for the next two to three months.'
On Wednesday, Imran Khan said that the Punjab government has imposed Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC) to hamper the upcoming power show of Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf candidates, Dawn reported.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)