ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) on Saturday clarified that social media platform X is facing a mass global outage, but the country’s internet services “remain fully functional.”
“This disruption is similar to the one reported on Thursday, which was resolved by the platform itself,” the telecom watchdog stated in a statement on Saturday.
“PTA’s investigation into the matter has confirmed that there are no technical issues at Pakistan’s internet gateways and all other internet services across the country remain fully functional,” the statement claimed.
The PTA added that global internet observatory NetBlocks also confirmed that the outages are international and “not related to any country-level internet disruptions or filtering”.
The clarification comes after users in Pakistan reported mass disruption on the social media platform, with real-time monitor Downdetector showing a peak of 372 outages at 5:36pm.
Over 600 complaints in total were reported on Saturday.
Earlier on Saturday, X said that it was working to resolve issues with various services that continued for a second day.
“We’re still experiencing issues from yesterday’s data center outage. Login and signup services are unavailable for some users, and there may be delays in notifications and premium features,” the engineering department of tech billionaire Elon Musk’s platform said on X.
“Our team is working 24/7 to resolve this. Thanks for your patience — updates soon,” it said at 5am PKT.
In the early hours of Friday, the platform had said, “X is aware some of our users are experiencing performance issues on the platform today. We are experiencing a data center outage, and the team is actively working to remediate the issue.”
With X stating a “data center outage” as a reason for the service disruption, users speculated that a fire at the platform’s data centre in the US state of Oregon’s Hillsboro city was the cause of the issues.
A fire broke out on Thursday morning at the data centre leased by X, forcing an extended response from emergency crews, Wired reported, citing multiple sources. The sources required anonymity as they were not authorized to speak publicly about the company, it added.
According to the report, firefighters arrived at the Hillsboro Technology Park and found a “room with batteries that were deemed to be involved in the fire.”
Hillsboro Fire and Rescue spokesperson Piseth Pich told Wired that the fire had “not spread to other parts of the building but said the room in question was heavy with smoke.”
X did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Wired. “It could not be learned whether server operations at the data centre had been affected by the incident,” the outlet noted.
Downdetector, which tracks outages, did not show problems reported by users at 1pm. However, outages had spiked to 76 at around 8:30pm last night.
This screengrab shows outages reported by X users in the past 24 hours from 2pm on May 24, 2025. — Downdetector
While updates by X did not mention issues with messaging services, many users reported not being able to access their direct messages (DMs), with an error reading, “Cannot retrieve messages at this time. Please try again later.”
Some users also reported being logged out of their accounts, with an error stating “something went wrong.”
X had remained blocked in Pakistan since Feb 17, 2024 — when allegations of widespread rigging during the general elections gained momentum — but was restored on May 7 amid the recent conflict with India.
