Pakistan faced another massive internet disruption on Tuesday, with nearly two-thirds of the country losing access. The outage crippled businesses, banking systems, and daily online activity, marking one of the largest nationwide blackouts in recent memory.
What makes this failure stand out is its timing. It happened on the exact same date — August 19 — as the notorious 2022 outage, when floods wiped out key fiber routes. Three years later, history seems to have repeated itself, exposing how little progress has been made to secure Pakistan’s digital infrastructure.
Industry Calls It a “National Failure”
The Wireless and Internet Service Providers Association of Pakistan (WISPAP) strongly criticized the breakdown. Its chairman, Shahzad Arshad, said the repeated outages highlight years of neglect and a dangerous reliance on only a few backbone providers.
“Internet blackouts in Pakistan are no longer rare accidents — they’re a recurring reality,” Arshad warned. “For two-thirds of the country to go offline in 2025, on the same day it happened in 2022, should set off alarms in government offices. We cannot claim to be building a digital economy on such an unstable foundation.”
He compared reliable internet access to electricity, stressing that freelancers, students, hospitals, and banks all depend on uninterrupted service. Each hour without connectivity, he said, costs Pakistan millions and erodes its credibility in global markets.
The Deeper Problem: Overdependence on a Fragile System
Experts say Pakistan’s internet struggles stem from an overcentralized structure, where only a handful of backbone providers carry most of the country’s traffic. When one fails, much of the country goes dark. Smaller local ISPs sometimes manage to keep limited pockets of users online, but they lack the resources to cover national-scale failures.
WISPAP has long urged regulators to act: diversify providers, build regional internet exchanges, and create redundant systems to absorb shocks. Without such reforms, Pakistan risks repeating the same cycle of outages — each one more costly than the last.