I S L A M A B A D / KARACHI: A fault in the India-Middle East-Western Europe (IMEWE) submarine cable caused consumers and businesses across Pakistan major internet disruptions, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) said on Saturday, adding that customers may experience slow browsing speed.

However, many people complained that they had no internet service at all.

`The Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL) has set up alternate routes to get the internet back up. The international team is dealing with the IMEWE and it will take a few days to sortout,` said PTCL spokesperson Imran Janjua.

`At the moment, there are two submarine cables which are down there was a similar issue in July this year and it is still being repaired,` he added.

The PTA and PTCL did not confirm how long it would take to restore internet services in the country.

The IMEWE submarine cable is an ultra-high capacity fibre optic underseacable system which links India and Europe via the Middle East. The 12,091kmlong cable has nine terminal stadons, operated by leading telecom carriers from eight countries.

`One of the PTCL cables has been cutnear Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Currently, internet services are af fected. However, PT CL is in process [of shifting] its traffic on alternate routes/ cables and services will be better soon,` said PTA spokesperson Khurram Mehran.

Khalid Bajwa of Patari, the country`s largest Pakistani music streaming platform, said that they had content scheduled to go up on socialmedia on Saturday.

`Everything has stopped.

There were a couple of videos which had to go to a brand for approval but nothing has happened. We upload around three to four videos everyday and have been trying to do so since morning but no luck,` he told Dawn.

WonderTree, a start-uprun by Mohammad Waqas, also faced similar issues.

`We are a technology start-up and we have not been able to do anything from morning to evening, he said.

`We had a lot of deadlines for Saturday, as it is the weekend and we needed to wind up a lot of things.

Online banking was not available either, so we could not make payments. We just weren`t able to function,` he added.

Akash Sheikh of Nest IO a technology incubator said: `It is of great concern that our internet connectivity nationwide has been affected. A strong internet link is essential for productivity and criti-cal to our infrastructure.

Naseer Akhtar, chairman of the Pakistan Software Houses Association (P@ SHA), explained that such accidents happened all over the world, but stressed the necessity to invest in alternative routes for internet traffic, so businesses and people don`t suffer. `We`re luckyit happened over the weekend and not during a busy week,` he said.

According to MustafaButt, an information technology entrepreneur, activities came to a halt at work throughout the day.

`Luckily it is a holiday and there is not much of a work load,` he added.

Mohammad Faisal, another IT entrepreneur, said that his entire day had been wasted. `Whatever little progress could be made was through mobile data. Most companies in the IT sector cannot afford the slightestdisruption in internet service,` said the entrepreneur.

The outage also impacted mobile networks and internet service providers.

Although Nayatel messaged its subscribers thatitslinks wouldupbyevening,browsing remained slow. PTCL subscribers struggled with browsing till late Saturday evening.

Wi-Tribe sent a message out to its customers explaining that `you might experi-ence slow speed issue today due to a severe bandwidth degradation affecting all the internet service providers in Pakistan.

Internet services were also disrupted in July, when a similar fault with one of the PTCL submarine cables created an outage. It took several hours before the internet traffic both incoming and outgoing were routed through an alternative cable.