The National Assembly rejected reports that its official YouTube channel was shut down, saying the outage was caused by a temporary technical glitch and not by a deliberate move to stop coverage of parliamentary proceedings.
The clarification comes a few days after the Lower House’s YouTube channel appeared inaccessible and live streams of the proceedings were not visible on the platform.
In a statement posted on social media late Friday, a House spokesman said the channel “had not been shut down at any point.”
Instead, a “social media server outage” briefly affected access to NA’s YouTube channel, he added, noting that the issue was cleared later that same day, after which the channel was “back to being fully operational” again.
The spokesperson also noted that recordings of the recent joint session of parliament, including members’ speeches, have already been uploaded and are available for the general public to view.
It is worth mentioning here that earlier parliamentary sessions were broadcast live on the channel as part of efforts to make debates more accessible to the public.
The absence of coverage also coincided with a period in which NA proceedings were not broadcast on state television, prompting questions from opposition lawmakers.
Reacting to the suspension of the broadcast, some members of the opposition also alleged that the government was seeking to limit public access to parliamentary debates. However, lower house officials maintained at all times that the issue was technical in nature.
The issue attracted attention when President Asif Ali Zardari convened a joint session of parliament on Friday, which approved three bills that had been returned by the president without signature, according to a statement from the Presidency.
The joint session subsequently passed three bills, which included the National Human Rights Commission Amendment Bill, 2025; the Danish School Authority Bill 2025; and the Domestic Violence (Prevention and Protection) Bill, 2025.
President Zardari had returned the bills last month despite their approval by the Senate and the National Assembly.
