PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Afghanistan is gradually getting back online, Taliban officials said, following a sweeping cut in cellphone and internet services that affected everything from banking to travel to aid work.
“Following a major technical disruption in Afghanistan’s mobile networks, phone call services have now begun to be gradually restored,” the Information and Culture Ministry said in a statement Wednesday, adding that teams were “working round-the-clock to ensure the complete restoration of services.”
“Users in some provinces have confirmed that mobile call connectivity has resumed, though difficulties persist in certain areas,” the ministry said.
Internet watchdog NetBlocks said Wednesday that there was “partial restoration of internet connectivity,” two days after it said Afghanistan was “in the midst of a total internet blackout.”
The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan also said Wednesday that the telecommunications outage appeared to have been reversed, with services resuming across the country of more than 40 million people.
“The cut was implemented without clear explanation from the de facto Taliban authorities and appears to have been reversed also without an explanation,” U.N. spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric told reporters in New York.
Dujarric said commercial air traffic had also been cleared to resume normally.
The outage followed an internet ban last month that was imposed on five northern provinces as part of a crackdown on immorality, fueling fears about new limits on Afghans’ access to the outside world.
The bans have been especially disheartening for women and girls who relied on the internet for online learning after the Taliban prohibited them from attending school after the sixth grade.
“The communications cut has risked inflicting multiple negative impacts on the Afghan people: on economic stability, on the continued grave situation for Afghan women and girls, and on the rights of all Afghan people to freedom of expression and access to information and privacy,” Dujarric said.
He said the cut had also disrupted the U.N.’s own work, including critical assistance to victims of recent earthquakes.
It was unclear exactly why the outage occurred or whether the Taliban ordered it.
Multiple news organizations, including NBC News, earlier reported that the Taliban had denied ordering the internet outage, attributing it to old fiber-optic cables that needed to be replaced.
Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said that those reports, which originated on the Urdu-language website Al-Emarah, were based on a fabricated statement and that internet service had been suspended for technical reasons.
Mushtaq Yusufzai reported from Peshawar and Jay Ganglani from Hong Kong.
