Internet goes down for several hours in parts of Pakistan

Internet connectivity was fully restored in central and northern parts of Pakistan on Friday after an hours-long outage caused by heavy rains and floods, the country's telecom regulator said.

Major Pakistani telecom operators reported earlier that connectivity was down in some regions, including the capital and other major urban centres, with one company reporting that flooding was responsible for the problem, Reuters reports.

"The technical fault in data networks which caused internet outage in Pakistan has been resolved," the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) said in a statement, adding that all internet services had been restored to normal.

State-owned Pakistan Telecommunication Company Ltd's (PTCL) said earlier that its optical fibre network was experiencing faults and users in northern and central regions were facing an outage.

"Due to heavy rains and floods, PTCL's optical fibre network is experiencing some technical faults," it said on Twitter.

It later said that the fault had been rectified.

PTCL's problems had a knock-on effect on other service providers, including on cellular data.

Telenor Pakistan, backed by Norway's Telenor (TEL.OL), said its internet network was down because of a network issue at its internet service provider.