Pakistan blocked social media following arrest of former Prime Minister

On 9th May 2023, amid the arrest of Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Imran Khan, Pakistan blocked access to social media platforms.

Specifically, OONI data shows that several ISPs in Pakistan started to block access to Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter at around 15:00 UTC on 9th May 2023. The next day, starting at around 05:00 UTC on 10th May 2023, OONI data shows that ISPs in Pakistan started to block access to Instagram as well.

The following chart aggregates OONI measurement coverage from the testing of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram in Pakistan from 30th April 2023 to 25th May 2023.

As is evident, the social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram) were found accessible, and mainly presented signs of blocking (anomalies and failures) between 9th to 17th May 2023. The anomalous measurements show that some ISPs implemented the blocks by means of TLS level interference (as the TLS handshakes timed out), while other ISPs implemented the blocks by means of DNS tampering, returning the private IP 127.0.0.1 as part of DNS resolution. The blocking of YouTube is further corroborated by the Google Transparency Report, which shows a drop in YouTube traffic from Pakistan during the same period. All platforms were unblocked on 17th May 2023.