Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited has issued a formal advisory to its customers warning of intermittent internet slowdowns across the country between April 14 and April 20, 2026, as scheduled maintenance work gets underway on an international submarine cable system. The repair operation is being conducted by an international submarine cable consortium tasked with fixing a fault in one of the undersea communication lines that form a critical part of Pakistan’s international internet connectivity infrastructure, with the maintenance work centred at the cable’s terminus in Fujairah, in the United Arab Emirates.
Fujairah serves as a major landing point for several of the submarine cable systems that carry internet traffic between Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, making it a strategically significant node in the global telecommunications network. Maintenance work at such a terminus point can have cascading effects on connectivity for countries whose international traffic is routed through or dependent on the affected cable, and Pakistan’s internet infrastructure is no exception given the country’s reliance on submarine cable systems for its international bandwidth. Submarine cable faults and the repair operations that follow invariably require coordinated efforts involving multiple countries and operators, and the scale of such work means that some degree of service impact is difficult to avoid even when traffic rerouting measures are deployed to manage the load. Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited acknowledged this in its communication to customers, stating that while efforts will be made to minimise disruption throughout the maintenance window, some level of degraded performance is unavoidable given the scope of the work being carried out.
Users across Pakistan can expect the most pronounced impact during evening peak hours, when internet traffic is at its heaviest and the capacity constraints created by the ongoing maintenance are most likely to manifest as noticeable slowdowns in browsing speeds, streaming quality, and data-intensive applications. The advisory covers the full period from April 14 through to April 20, 2026, meaning the disruption could persist for up to a week depending on the pace of the repair work at the Fujairah terminus. Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited apologised to its customers for the inconvenience and advised them to expect temporary fluctuations in connectivity during this window. Users experiencing degraded service should note that the issue stems from international infrastructure repair rather than a local network fault, and normal service levels are expected to resume once work at the terminus has been completed.
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