While Pakistan continues to struggle with persistent internet slowdowns and connectivity degradation, the world’s largest cloud infrastructure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), also faced a global outage this week — underlining a deeper truth: the world’s internet, from Silicon Valley to Islamabad, rests on fragile digital foundations.
Pakistan’s Internet Feels Like the 1990s
From Karachi to Gilgit, users report sluggish browsing and download speeds that recall the dial-up era. The problems, which began in early September 2025, have persisted despite PTCL’s repeated assurances that submarine-cable faults have been “restored.”
PTCL announced on October 13 that maintenance on a submarine-cable repeater could cause service degradation for up to 18 hours on October 14. Yet, more than a week later, freelancers, businesses, and students continue to experience disruptions.
“Everything loads like it did in the 90s,” complained a university student in Lahore. “It feels like Pakistan has gone backward while the rest of the world moves to 5G.”
Industry sources told Pakistan Narrative that PTCL’s internal backbone — the Pakistan Internet Exchange (PIE) — remains heavily congested, with minimal upgrades to handle growing national demand.
Economic and Educational Fallout
The consequences are dire. Pakistan’s freelance community — among the top five globally — is losing international contracts as clients face missed deadlines. Call centers and software firms report latency spikes that cripple voice, cloud, and payment applications. Online education and remote work have suffered nationwide.
Analysts warn that continued negligence could cause millions of dollars in foreign-exchange losses as global clients pull out of Pakistani contracts due to unstable connectivity.
Global Parallels: Amazon’s Cloud Outage Shakes the Web
Just as Pakistan grapples with its own digital bottleneck, Amazon.com confirmed a major outage on October 20 that disrupted thousands of websites worldwide — including Snapchat, Reddit, Zoom, Venmo, and Coinbase.
According to Reuters, the incident originated in AWS’s US-EAST-1 data-center cluster in Virginia — the same region responsible for multiple previous global slowdowns. The failure was traced to an internal EC2 subsystem and DNS malfunction, crippling the very cloud engines that power much of the internet.
AWS said the problem had been “fully mitigated” after more than nine hours of disruptions, but analysts noted that millions of users across the U.S. and Europe faced outages in banking, telecom, and e-commerce systems.
Ken Birman, a Cornell University professor, said developers’ over-reliance on a single cloud region makes the modern web “a fragile ecosystem where one glitch can bring down half the internet.”
From AWS’s global crash to PTCL’s submarine congestion, these parallel crises illustrate the same fundamental issue: digital dependence without redundancy. In Pakistan’s case, a single upstream provider (PTCL/PIE) handles most of the international bandwidth. Globally, just a handful of companies — AWS, Google, Microsoft — carry the backbone of online life.
Cyber-security analysts have long warned that this concentration of control leaves both developed and developing nations exposed. As ESET’s Jake Moore put it:
“This outage once again highlights the dependency we have on relatively fragile infrastructures.”
Experts urge the Ministry of Information Technology & Telecommunication (MoITT) to take decisive action — not merely patch submarine cables, but modernize the entire internet backbone.
Pakistan’s $3 billion digital-export economy cannot thrive on outdated networks and reactive maintenance. The government must push for multiple upstream routes, transparent performance metrics, and investment in domestic fiber redundancy to prevent chronic outages.
Without intervention, Pakistan risks being left digitally isolated — a dangerous prospect in an economy increasingly dependent on online trade, remote work, and cloud services.
A Wake-Up Call for Pakistan’s Digital Future
The current crisis should serve as a national wake-up call.
While the world debates how to strengthen global cloud infrastructure after AWS’s latest breakdown, Pakistan must first fix its own house — by upgrading PTCL’s internal networks, diversifying international gateways, and ensuring uninterrupted access for the freelancers, companies, and students driving its digital economy.
If the Ministry of IT continues to ignore the warnings, Pakistan could face not just connectivity problems — but a major digital-era economic setback.
Pakistan’s internet slowdown has entered its seventh week, crippling freelancers and businesses. Combined with Amazon AWS’s global outage, the crisis exposes how fragile the world’s digital infrastructure truly is — and why Pakistan must urgently invest in network modernization.
Author Bio:
Rashid Mehmood is a technology and telecom analyst covering space, broadband, and digital-infrastructure developments, AI, cloud computing, and deepfake-detection technologies across Pakistan.
