PTCL warns of slower evening internet until 2 November as AAE1 cable is repaired
Emergency work on the Italy to France section of the Asia Africa Europe 1 cable began on 27 October, and PTCL expects slower service at peak hours.
Pakistan's evening internet may run slower until Monday 2 November while engineers repair a section of the AAE1 submarine cable. Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited said emergency maintenance began on 27 October and expects "minor service degradation" during peak hours.
The faulty stretch lies between Italy and France, at the European end of the system. Websites and services hosted in Europe are the most likely to load slowly, PTCL's notice says, especially in the evening when traffic is heaviest. PTCL said users may notice "a slight decline in service quality while the maintenance work continues" and asked customers for patience and cooperation.
What AAE1 carries
AAE1, short for Asia Africa Europe 1, runs for about 25,000 kilometres and links Southeast Asia with Europe through Egypt. It comes ashore in Karachi and is one of the main routes for Pakistan's international internet traffic. A fault far from Pakistan can therefore be felt at home, because traffic that normally crosses the damaged section has to find another way.
The system has been a source of trouble before. A fault on AAE1 near Qatar in January 2025 slowed internet speeds in Pakistan for nearly two weeks, ProPakistani reported. This is also not PTCL's first evening slowdown warning this year: in May it announced repairs to an international submarine cable system from 11 to 18 May, with degraded speeds possible in the evenings, Profit reported.
A slowdown, not an outage
The notice does not point to a nationwide outage. Services hosted on servers inside Pakistan are not named among those at risk, while anything routed through European data centres, including global apps, software updates and video platforms, may lag in the evening.
PTCL has not said how large the slowdown will be, whether all internet providers are affected or only some, or whether it will add backup bandwidth while the repair continues. The extent of any slowdown will vary with the hour and with the services a user is reaching.
Work is scheduled to finish on Monday 2 November.
