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Pakistan is facing a major internet crisis, with many users experiencing slow speeds and service disruptions. This problem is not due to a local issue but is the result of damage to the massive undersea cables in the Red Sea, a critical international internet highway.
The heart of the problem lies with multiple cable cuts that happened in early September off the coast of Yemen. These incidents have affected key fiber optic cables that carry a large portion of Pakistan’s internet traffic to and from Europe. Think of these cables as the main digital highways connecting Pakistan to the rest of the world. With these highways damaged, the internet is experiencing a severe “traffic jam,” causing major delays and frustration for users.
There have been multiple incidents of damage to undersea cables in the Baltic Sea and other European waters as well, often involving ships with suspected links to Russia or China. These incidents are widely viewed by European officials and NATO countries as potential “hybrid warfare” or sabotage aimed at critical infrastructure, intended to disrupt international communications, finance, and internet traffic.
While Russia has denied involvement, the incidents have raised international alarms about the vulnerability of the global internet’s physical backbone. However, due to the high redundancy in European networks, individual cuts have generally not caused prolonged, widespread outages outside of the immediate regional impact compared to the more frequent internet disruption in Pakistan.
Amnesty Says Pakistani Govt Spying on Citizens
The new Amnesty International report on Pakistan’s far-reaching surveillance system highlights that the Chinese-built internet firewall, known as the Web Monitoring System (WMS 2.0), is a key factor behind chronic internet slowdowns and disruptions across the country.
This system, along with the Lawful Intercept Management System (LIMS), requires the network to conduct resource-intensive deep packet inspection to monitor, filter, and censor content for millions of citizens, creating significant network congestion and latency, which directly translates to degraded internet speeds for users and economic losses for businesses.
While government officials have often denied that the systems are throttling the internet and have blamed other factors (like faulty submarine cables or excessive VPN use), they have confirmed the deployment of the Web Monitoring System (WMS) for “content management.”
The Real-World Impact
The consequences of this internet slowdown are being felt across the country, especially in the booming IT sector. The industry, which earns over $3 billion annually from exports, is now under serious threat.
- Impact on Businesses: Companies that rely on cloud services like Microsoft Azure are facing significant challenges. When the internet slows down, it causes what IT professionals call latency spikes or delays in data traveling back and forth. For businesses that depend on fast, real-time connections for software development, financial transactions, and client communication, these delays can lead to major losses in productivity and can damage their reputation with international clients.
- Financial Loss: The Pakistan Software Houses Association (P@SHA) has warned that these disruptions could cost the IT industry up to $150 million every year. They estimate that just one hour of a nationwide outage can cost the sector over $1 million.
- Freelancers in Trouble: Pakistan has one of the largest communities of online freelancers in the world. Their livelihoods depend on a stable internet connection to meet deadlines, upload large files, and communicate with clients. The current slowdown is making it very difficult for them to work, directly affecting the country’s foreign earnings.
The Dual Challenge: Infrastructure and Policy
The table below outlines the dual challenge Pakistan faces, encompassing both technical connectivity issues and the government’s approach to digital infrastructure.
| Connectivity Challenge | Policy & Technical Response |
| Single Point of Failure | Pakistan’s over-reliance on Karachi as the sole landing point for all undersea internet cables creates a major vulnerability, making the entire nation susceptible to slowdowns if a few cables are damaged. |
| BGP Rerouting Issues | When primary cables fail, the internet’s Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) automatically finds alternative routes. However, these are often inefficient, leading to increased latency (delays) and packet loss (data dropping). |
| Lack of Redundancy | While Pakistan has a large total capacity, this capacity is not always configured for full redundancy. When operators reroute traffic, the backup routes are often already near their capacity limits. This was evident during a previous AAE-1 cable fault, when rerouted traffic caused severe network congestion, leading to slow speeds and intermittent connectivity for users. |
| The Web Monitoring System (WMS 2.0) | The government has invested in a national internet firewall. While framed as a cybersecurity tool, digital rights groups have identified it as a mass surveillance system that can also filter and restrict online traffic, highlighting a disconnect between the goals of a digital economy and a system designed for control. |
What’s Next for Pakistan’s Internet Connectivity Challenges?
The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) and other government bodies have acknowledged the problem and are working to find a temporary solution by rerouting internet traffic through alternative, working cables. This is not a permanent fix, as these alternate routes have limited capacity and can also be congested.
IT officials have stated that a full repair of the damaged cables is a complicated and time-consuming process. Specialized ships are needed to locate the cables at the bottom of the sea, bring them to the surface, and repair them. As of late September, officials predict that these repairs could take weeks without providing a definitive timeline.
In conclusion, the frequent and severe degradation of internet services in Pakistan stems from a combination of fragile infrastructure and increasing state control. The core technical weakness is an over-reliance on limited submarine cables, particularly those routed through the vulnerable Red Sea corridor, meaning a single cut due to a ship anchor or other event instantly cripples a large portion of the national bandwidth due to a lack of network diversification and robust internal redundancies.
This problem is significantly exacerbated by government crackdowns and lack of transparency, as digital rights experts and industry bodies suggest the rumored deployment of national monitoring systems or “firewalls” creates deliberate and heavy bottlenecks, causing widespread latency and congestion. Furthermore, these restrictions, coupled with frequent social media bans, drive millions of users to use inefficient Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), which place an immense, unnecessary load on the already congested international gateways, collectively destabilizing connectivity and costing the national digital economy hundreds of millions of dollars in lost business.
