KARACHI: Internet connectivity in Pakistan began to stabilise on Tuesday after being severely hit by global and regional outages, with service providers shifting traffic to overland fibre routes from China to restore capacity, according to industry experts.
However, the recovery has been uneven, with users in several regions still reporting intermittent access and slow speeds as repairs to undersea cables continue. According to outage tracking platform Downdetector, user reports regarding Cybernet outages surged throughout Tuesday, with multiple spikes observed between late morning and late evening.
Seventy-five per cent of the reported problems were related to internet access, while 14 per cent involved total service blackouts and 11 per cent were linked to website access issues, the data indicated.
Cybernet is one of Pakistan’s leading internet service and network infrastructure providers, operating one of the country’s submarine cable landing stations and offering broadband, enterprise connectivity and wholesale bandwidth services.
The live outage map showed concentrated problem areas, suggesting widespread disruptions across major urban centres. In his comments to The News, tech expert Habibullah Khan said: “A couple of events happened together to cause disruption. First, Amazon Web Services (AWS) had a global outage. As Amazon Web Services (AWS) hosts core infrastructure for countless apps and websites worldwide, when one of its key systems failed the disruption caused delays across many apps and websites so internet users get hit hard.”
Compounding that, he added, the PEACE submarine cable went down because of a cut. “The cut is somewhere between the Red Sea and Europe, and it will take time to identify and diagnose its type and send a ship to fix it,” Khan explained.
The I ME WE (India-Middle East-Western Europe) submarine cable system is already down for Pakistan. “This means internet users got hit by both cables being down and the AWS outage,” Khan shared, “Users might have noticed that a lot of internet service providers (ISP) improved speed [on Tuesday]. One of the reasons is that the cables coming overland from China have a lot of capacity and that has resolved half the issue already.”
According to a post on microblogging site Mastodon by NetBlocks, network connectivity for StormFiber, one of Pakistan’s leading internet service providers, dropped sharply around Monday. The data showed that connectivity remained stable at close to 100 per cent between October 17 and 19, before plunging to nearly zero on October 20 (Monday).
Although partial recovery was observed later that day, the network continued to experience instability, fluctuating between 30 per cent and 60 per cent through October 21 (Tuesday). The lowest connectivity level recorded during this period was 36 per cent, suggesting a prolonged outage that significantly affected users nationwide, the post added.
‘WORRYING PROBLEM’
Widespread internet disruptions across Pakistan should be a wakeup call for the government to improve its internet infrastructure, say experts.
Waqas Naeem, a digital media consultant, believed that “internet disruptions are choking Pakistan’s digital growth. While officials blame damaged cables abroad, the real problem lies in our repeated local outages and lack of preparedness. On the one hand, we proudly promote Pakistan as a tech destination at global platforms like GITEX, LEAP, London Tech Week, Web Summit, and other major technology conferences; yet on the other, these persistent internet crises are damaging our credibility and the very brand image we’re trying to build internationally.”
Chairperson of the Wireless and Internet Service Providers Association of Pakistan (Wispap) Shahzad Arshad said that these disruptions are not isolated incidents but part of a worrying pattern. “Pakistan’s digital economy cannot run on borrowed bandwidth and fragile cables. We need resilience, not dependence,” Arshad remarked.
Over the past month, internet users faced severe slowdowns and outages due to multiple submarine cable cuts in the Red Sea, followed by maintenance activities involving repeater replacements. Each incident resulted in noticeable performance degradation across all major networks, disrupting online businesses, education and communication.
Naeem added: How can our IT professionals and freelancers compete globally without stable connectivity? We are not just losing money; we are losing trust. The cable cuts have become a routine crisis, and unless we commit to a resilient digital infrastructure, or explore alternatives like Starlink, Pakistan’s vision of becoming a global digital powerhouse will remain out of reach.
LACK OF TRANSPARENCY
Digital Rights Activist and OSINT Analyst Anees Qureshi, who is associated with research think-tank Bytes for All, Pakistan, shared that this time, internet disruptions in Pakistan are indeed caused by a fault in international submarine cables SMW4 and AAE-1.
“However, in September, we witnessed government infrastructure degrading and mobile data being throttled, as millions of users reported being unable to make WhatsApp calls or send images and videos,” Qureshi said.
Wazir Ali, a local internet cable provider based in Karachi’s Clifton neighbourhood, expressed his frustration. While talking to The News over the phone, he shared that he was at his client’s house to resolve a complaint. “Some of my clients work remotely, and over the last few days, there has been a surge in complaints.” While acknowledging that an undersea cable cut is a problem, Ali added, “Internet issues have been going on for about 20 days now. When we ask the service provider, we are told that work is in progress. There are no definite answers, nor do we get a timeline for service restoration.”
He also added that the internet has been a problem ever since the government introduced the ‘firewall’. A report released earlier that month by Amnesty International, titled ‘Shadows of Control: Censorship and Mass Surveillance in Pakistan’, revealed the procurement of a Chinese-style firewall system -- something the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) had previously denied. The report also documented instances of mass surveillance and internet throttling during major national events.
“The government’s lack of transparency, along with misleading explanations -- sometimes blaming VPNs or bandwidth shortages -- raises serious concerns about digital rights and the future of Digital Pakistan,” Qureshi said.
CONSISTENT CONNECTIVITY
Pakistan ranks seventh in South Asia in the Internet Resilience Index, ahead of only Iran and Afghanistan, with low scores in infrastructure (34) and performance (31), and 79th globally in the Inclusive Internet Index, with deteriorating internet quality, according to a report by the Sustainable Development Policy Institute.
Average speeds dropped 40 per cent in 2024, with Pakistan now among the lowest 12 per cent globally for mobile and broadband speeds, trailing behind war-torn Palestine and Libya. Despite consuming over 25,000 petabytes of data, internet access remains at just 32.9 per cent, the SDPI added.
Per CEO of The SquarePeg/CMOontheGO, a digital marketing agency, Zunaira Omar, “When the internet goes down, business in Pakistan effectively stops. Besides social media, payments, logistics and global service delivery are also affected. If we want to call ourselves a digital economy, connectivity has to be treated like electricity -- consistent, accountable and prioritised. The cost of these disruptions is dwindling trust in Pakistan’s digital reliability at a time when we should be signaling stability to investors.”
“Pakistan has an infrastructure problem,” Ali added, “developed countries are able to fix the problem in a couple of days while we wait for months for things to get better.”
“Every time an undersea cable or cloud service falters, our economy takes the hit. It is time to invest in redundancy does not excuse,” Arshad added. He emphasised that Pakistan’s growing reliance on a few international transit points and global cloud providers leaves the country vulnerable to external technical faults.
What could be the way forward?
It is not impossible [for Pakistan to isolate itself from global outages], Zunaira shared, but it does require foresight, investment and coordination. “Countries that have achieved resilience against outages did so by building redundancy: multiple undersea cables, local data centers and strong peering agreements. Pakistan still relies heavily on a few international cables, so when one goes down, the whole ecosystem feels it. We need a national strategy that prioritises digital continuity -- from backup routing to local cloud infrastructure -- not just crisis response.”
Former chairperson of Pakistan Software Houses Association (PSHA) Muhammad Zohaib Khan said that “Pakistani companies also need to make strategic choices about whether to host their data locally or abroad. For instance, there are firms that operate data servers overseas but maintain support teams within Pakistan to ensure continuity and responsiveness. This hybrid approach shows how local capacity can complement global infrastructure.”
“Global cloud providers such as Google, Microsoft, and AWS do not have data centres or support hubs in Pakistan. Naturally, they should also consider establishing local data centres, support centres and back-office operations here,” the former chairperson said.
“Pakistan must diversify its connectivity and cloud presence, urgently,” the Wispap chairperson concluded and urged the relevant ministries, regulatory authorities and operators to take this opportunity to develop a unified national strategy for internet resilience.