Pakistan's Internet Connectivity Abruptly Plummets To 20%

Pakistan's internet connectivity dropped to 20% of normal levels Tuesday, affecting the country's 116 million internet users, according to NetBlocks. The outage primarily impacted backbone operator PTCL. It's unclear what caused the outage. The Wireless and Internet Service Providers Association of Pakistan noted the date coincided with a similar collapse in 2022. Pakistan suffered $1.62 billion in economic losses from internet disruptions in 2024, the highest globally. The country confirmed installing a national internet firewall months earlier.

Take that Web-Apps

[BrendaEM]

It could happen to the U.S., U.K., anywhere. While it's profitable to strangle customers who will never own their software, it's terrible for any nation's security.

Re:Take that Web-Apps

[Tony Isaac]

Why "could" it happen to the US or UK or anywhere?

Pakistan has a constant problem with internet connections. My company has a subsidiary there, so many of my teammates are in LaHore. Internet issues are so common that just about everybody has two ISPs in hopes that one of the two will be working at any given time. Likewise, electricity outages are commonplace.

The US and UK don't have these kinds of issues. Sure, internet (and electricity) outages can happen anywhere. But the infrastructure is far more robust in the western world, making the likelihood much lower.

Re:

[registrations_suck]

....as far as you know....

Re:

[Tony Isaac]

Not in Pakistan. They have constant problems with internet outages there. It could just as easily be a run-of-the-mill outage because the ISP has antique equipment that is hanging on for dear life.

Re:

[Bert64]

A significant part is because they are behind with the rollout of IPv6, especially compared to nearby countries like India and China.

Pakistan has 22 legacy IPv4 addresses per 1000 citizens in the country and as usual those won't be evenly distributed with many used for servers etc. The end result of this is heavy address sharing via CGNAT and similar mechanisms which increases costs while introducing bottlenecks and reliability problems. With low deployment of IPv6 (PTCL has none, some of the other operator

Should have gone IPv5.

[nevermindme]

Should have gone IPv5.

Re:

[hcs_$reboot]

Or maybe India getting back at them after the AI171 sabotage.

My ISP does that every weekend

[Tablizer]

welcome to enshittification. [wikipedia.org]

Porn

[registrations_suck]

I guess they will have to get their porn from magazines for the time being.

Incidents like this really underscore the importance of having hard copy backups.

Trinocular showed outage start and recovery

[john_heidemann]

Trinocular, our outage detection system using pings to millions of networks, showed the Pakistani Internet started dropping off at 17:05 UTC on the 19th, then eventually recovered around 20:45 UTC, see https://ant.isi.edu/blog/?p=22... [isi.edu] . With more than half the networks down in many places, this outage was very serious!