Users in Pakistan have reportedly been unable to access X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, intermittently through Saturday night and Sunday morning, multiple outlets reported, outages that come amid frequent internet failures in the month leading up to, on and since a contentious Feb. 8 national election.
A Pakistani voter casts their ballot during polling for Pakistan's general election at a polling ... [+]
Social media platforms have been marred with issues in Pakistan for the last month and, on Saturday and Sunday, watchdog monitoring service Netblocks confirmed X has experienced "national-scale disruption ... amid escalating unrest and protests over allegations of election fraud."
Internet blackouts and a suspension of mobile phone service were reported across Pakistan on election day, which a Ministry of Interior spokesperson said was done by the government in response to "recent incidents of terrorism" in the country and meant to "maintain the law and order situation and deal with possible threats.”
Two days after the election, on Feb. 10, Pakistan experienced another large-scale X outage as evidence of election rigging began to surface online and political critics spoke against the county's polling process.
On Saturday, the commissioner of Rawalpindi, Liaqat Ali Chattha, said he would hand himself over to police after admitting he helped to manipulate election results and "personally supervised" the switching of 70,000 votes—"we converted the losers into winners,” he reportedly said.
It is unclear who, if anyone, is behind the X outages reported Saturday and Sunday, and the company did not immediately respond to Forbes’ request for comment.
X owner Elon Musk, the world's second-richest person, has not commented publicly on the outage.
This is a developing story.