For the free online tech skill classes advertised, there were hundreds of Facebook “likes” and in the end 1,500 people signed up. But on the first day last week, only a handful of those registered managed to log in to the live session. The internet was working at a snail’s speed.
“We received hundreds of complaints,” says the course tutor, Wardah Noor, founder of the IT training firm XWave, based in Layyah, in the Pakistani province of Punjab.
Internet speeds in the country have dropped by 30-40% over the past few weeks, according to the Wireless and Internet Service Providers Association of Pakistan (Wispap). IT companies say it has cost Pakistan businesses hundreds of millions of dollars.
Those who were able to connect to Noor’s course complained of choppy audio and failed connections. “We had little choice but to end the two-hour session in an hour and the Q&A part in the programme was dropped,” she says.
The live sessions have now been turned into recorded lessons, which Noor says, “are just not the same”.
Many in the IT and software sector believe the government’s testing of a new nationwide internet firewall is behind the mayhem.
“On the one hand, the new government is promising an information technology revolution for Pakistan, and on the other it is throttling it completely,” says Noor.
The government has repeatedly denied being responsible for the problems but has admitted plans for a firewall to regulate, block malicious content and protect government networks.
The information and technology minister Shaza Fatima Khawaja, said on Sunday that her team had been “working tirelessly” with internet service providers to resolve the issue and blamed Pakistan’s “large population” for straining the network.
“It is the right of the government to take measures to protect its interests given the cybersecurity attacks that Pakistan is facing,” she said.
The firewall will allow the Pakistan government to be able to get to people carrying out “anti-state propaganda”, Khawaja says. Iran, China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and several other countries already have such firewalls.
After the riots sparked by the arrest last year of former prime minister Imran Khan, the Pakistan government blocked social media sites where support for Khan had been building and slowed connection speeds.
The platform X has been blocked since the February elections due to “national security” concerns, with supporters of Khan’s party point out that he is the most popular Pakistani on the platform, with nearly 21 million followers.
If the new firewall is behind the huge disruptions the country is experiencing, there should have been some warning, says Khuram Rahat, vice-chair of P@SHA, an association of about 1,500 software and IT companies.
“It makes sense to take steps for our national security, but in hindsight I would say, it could have been planned and managed better,” he says.
Azam Mughal, cybersecurity expert at P@SHA, says members have reported huge financial losses. “International customers have told these companies they don’t want to give them projects in future, since everything in tech has to be about delivering on time,” says Mughal.
He says business could have been warned. “Whenever a new software is implemented, it is tested in a close lab environment, to anticipate the teething pains; this did not happen.
“Our survey has found that the country has lost up to $300m due to internet disruptions in the last few months,” he says.
Pakistan recorded $298m (£228m) in IT exports in June, up 33% from the year before. IT exports were worth $3.2bn in the fiscal year that ended in June, up from $2.5bn in 2023.
Mughal says privacy concerns should not be ignored because a firewall controls, filters and monitors content coming in and out in the digital territory, including who is generating it. “Whenever you try to bring digital frontiers under control, it is a form of censorship,” he says.
However, a firewall can minimise the spread of extremism, religious intolerance and fake content.
But many question the need for a firewall. Jehan Ara, a startup ecosystem consultant, says: “Is it to control conversations on social media or is it to prevent criticism and transparency?”
Hassan Belal Zaidi, an editor at Dawn newspaper, says the slowdown is a “major headache for national newsrooms”, and it is now hard to reach correspondents in remote areas.
“WhatsApp has come to be seen and used as the primary medium for relaying information, multimedia content and pics, and this system has been all but crippled with the throttling of these apps,” he says. “The astronomical rise in taxes on internet services means we’re paying nearly double the price for half the connectivity.”
But the worst affected are perhaps the more than 500,000 IT sector freelancers in Pakistan who rely on mobile data.
“Is reliable internet too much to ask for in today’s digital age?” says Bilal Khosa, 25, who works remotely in digital marketing.
“Pending tasks, missed deadlines, and lost productivity are becoming a norm,” he says.
Khosa uses Fiverr, a freelancing platform, which now displays an “out of office” message. The slowdown has had a devastating effect on his ranking which could take “six months or more” to restore, he says.
“The competition is so tough, there are hundreds just waiting to take your place,” says Khosa.
Bigger companies have not escaped. Veqar Islam, CEO at Jaffer Business Systems, which employs of more than 1,000 people, says “fiddling in this bizarre manner” is equivalent to taking Pakistan “back to the stone age”.
He says he has just had a difficult meeting with US clients: “They told me that if we want to work with them, we need to consider relocating our back end.”
Islam says other customers are threatening to terminate contracts. “Such measures don’t just create disasters in the present; they have long-lasting effects of up to decades.”
