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It’s been over 10 days that the app formerly known as Twitter has been inaccessible in Pakistan. We don’t know when it will be back, or for how long. We don’t know why it’s been blocked and we certainly don’t know by whom because no government authority or department is owning up to it. The interior and information ministers have denied responsibility, which leaves the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) as the possible culprit, given that this is the only other ‘legal’ authority empowered to do so. But the PTA, whose mandate includes the ‘provision of telecommunication services in Pakistan,’ is incommunicado.

Meanwhile, citizens are finding that the VPNs they are using to get around the blocking are also being blocked, which ends up slowing the entire Internet down. This is how it was explained to me: ‘Imagine the Internet as a vast network of interconnected and interdependent highways, roads, and streets that connect different places. Think of a single website as a destination that might use several of these highways to ensure you can reach it quickly and efficiently from wherever you are. Now, if you want to stop people from reaching a specific site, you set up a roadblock which then causes jams on other roads (imagine turning Shahrah-e-Faisal into a single lane road)........

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