Sindh govt websites go down due to issues at NTC’s end

On Monday, when the Sindh government’s offices were closed on account of a public holiday to mark the death anniversary of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, the provincial administration’s virtual presence on the World Wide Web also disappeared temporarily.

Despite repeated attempts, these three main websites remained inaccessible: the Sindh government’s official web presence (sindh.gov.pk), the website of the Chief Minister House or Secretariat (cm.sindh.gov.pk) and the recently launched official web presence of the information science & technology department (istd.sindh.gov.pk).

When contacted, CM’s Special Assistant on IT Tanzeela Umi Habiba admitted that the official websites of the provincial government had gone down. She said the problem was on the part of the National Telecommunication Corporation (NTC), because of which the websites had been rendered inaccessible.

Tanzeela said the NTC had informed them that the issue would be resolved shortly, with the websites becoming accessible again. She pointed out that the Sindh government had to rely upon the NTC for the availability of its websites due to their official nature, so no other system could be used for the purpose.

She clarified that other than the NTC, there was no internal issue on the part of the provincial government that led to the websites going offline. The websites were back online by 8:45pm. The websites of the Sindh government had been observed to be inaccessible a few weeks ago as well. The CM’s aide, however, clarified that the issue was momentary in nature, and had occurred only on Monday, denying the existence of a recurring problem as regards the government websites’ availability. It remains unclear if the rain, which persisted throughout the day, had any role to play in the websites of the provincial government going down.