Naveed Ahmad
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan government’s web portal – www.pakistan.gov.pk – along with a dozen other official websites of various departments and ministries is finally accessible after an outage of some two days. The other affected websites included ministry of IT & Telecom, ministry of commerce, electronic-Government Directorate (EGD) etc. The News learnt through a number of cyber savvy professionals from within the country and in England as well as Canada that the country’s prime cyber access point – www.pakistan.gov.pk – was inaccessible since Thursday.
Despite repeated phone calls by the web surfers as well as this
correspondent to the officials concerned in the EGD of the IT & Telecom ministry, the portal could not be restored until late Thursday night. After a call by The News late Thursday night, IT & Telecom Secretary Farrukh Qayyum declared emergency and the napping top bosses of the EGD were contacted. He confirmed to The News that the prolonged glitch had occurred. Official sources told The News that the EGD staff concerned waited for the Friday morning to intervene and started restoration attempts at its servers located in the National Telecommunication Corporation (NTC) premises. The News learnt that most official websites of the country are hosted on the servers of the while over dozen with the EGD. “Due to a failure at the EGD servers, the country’s web portal was down along with websites of other ministries,” a well-placed source told The News.
The News learnt that the out-dated servers could not take up the web access load eventually leading to an absolute outage.
“The problem has been identified and the corrective actions have been taken by the related department,” said Noor-ud-Din Baqai, member telecom of the IT & Telecom ministry while talking to The News. Even till the filing of this report, the website outage has not been fully addressed and the problem revives itself occasionally.
In his brief comments over the phone, Baqai said: “Our experts are still working to adjust and balance the load of website access attempts on the servers.”
The News learnt that the entire EGD team was caught napping when the netizens across the world were failing to access Pakistan through its cyber gateway.
Interestingly, ‘the official web gateway to Pakistan’ is a key online link by General Musharraf’s website www.presidentofpakistan.gov.pk).
Though hosting services have become cheaper and more reliable with redundant bandwidth backups the world over, the country’s official web portal as well as crucial department websites are hosted by the EGD along with NTC using outdated and ill-maintained servers.
Even General Musharraf’s website is hosted in United States with Texas-based Rackspace Managed Hosting. Despite being vulnerable to virus attacks and hacking attempts, General Musharraf’s website could never be brought down, primarily due to secure and professional services by the world leading web host company.
Besides General Musharraf’s website, certain other official websites such as Election Commission, CBR, M/o Finance, SECP, PTV and MCA were accessible while ‘the country’s official web portal’ was “down and out”. All the ministries as well as department have hosted their website with professional companies abroad.
At the same time, the websites hosted with the NTC were also working fine. According some top experts within the official ranks, the up time and down time of the official portal is almost equal, which clearly reflects upon the performance of EGD.
It is worth mentioning here that the government has released million of rupees for the web portal as well as its maintenance.
A senior official told The News on Friday, “Technically speaking, unless the DNS server is alive, the web service cannot remain available,” said a mid-level IT professional adding that it is “a simple logic and no rocket science”.
The IT officials admit that the Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed
Denial of Service (DDoS) cannot be countered and diluted in the absence of state-of-the-art servers backed by dedicated professionals. Senior officials repeatedly complain absence of competent and committed professionals within the public sector as the thriving companies in the private sector attracted the brighter lads. The EGD had to face an extremely embarrassing situation when a service provider snapped bandwidth services due to non-payment of bills. And this time, the EGD officials were again napping by foreign IT professionals as well as candidate aspiring to work with the government by applying online. Some of the whistle-blowers included candidates for February 5 advertisement for assistant director at IT&T Ministry who had failed to apply online owing to the prolonged outage of the web portal. Contrary to the instruction in the advertisement, the application form for Director IT position is not
available at the ministry’s website.
Naveed Ahmad Rana
Investigative Journalist/Academic Islamabad, PAKISTAN
Cell 00 92 321 52 111 17
00 92 333 52 111 17
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