Introduction
If you’re in Pakistan and your internet has been as slow as a snail for the past week or so, you’re not alone. Across big cities and small towns, users are complaining of painfully slow speeds, timeouts, and crashes. Whether you’re reading your email, accessing the cloud or just scrolling through social media, it seems the internet is just not playing along.
This isn’t some minor bug—it’s a large issue with a number of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like Nayatel, PTCL, and others. And the kicker is that the outages aren’t from one cause but a combination of multiple issues stacked on top of one another. It’s the internet equivalent of a perfect storm.
Let’s get into what’s actually going on behind the scenes, what it’s really going to do for you, and what’s being done to resolve it.
Scope of the Problem
This is not a one-off hiccup. Across Islamabad to Karachi, Lahore to Quetta, and all points in between, internet users experience the mass outages. Social networking sites, internet forums, and customer service lines have filled up with complaints.
What’s compounding this issue is that it’s impacting all kinds of users—students listening to web lectures, remote workers in video meetings, companies with cloud infrastructure, and even occasional users who want to binge-watch their favorite shows. Everyone’s burning.
Unlike service outages on an individual basis, in this scenario, multiple ISPs have been impacted. Two of the largest internet service providers in Pakistan, PTCL and Nayatel, both openly reported the issue, blaming the problem on upstream connectivity issues and outages with big service hosts like Microsoft and Cloudflare. The outage is a cascading effect—something in a chain is broken and influences many others, causing a deterioration in service quality.
Top Reasons for the Internet Slowdown
Eastbound International Traffic Disruption
One of the biggest culprits in this connectivity mess is the disruption of eastbound global traffic. To the non-technical consumer, this can be mere techno-gobbledegook, but here’s what it actually translates to in plain English: the information flowing from your computer to global destinations and servers has to go through complex networks governed by upstream providers. If one of these connections fails or performs poorly, everything downstream—yes, even your in-house connection—comes to a standstill.
In their business alert, Nayatel informed that it’s one of their upstream providers that’s experiencing problems. That affects the routing of the internet traffic, which causes higher latency (a.k.a. lag) and lower speeds. It’s like a clogged highway off-ramp creating traffic miles from the actual problem.
Since Pakistan relies so heavily on international routing of services like Google, Netflix, Zoom, and so many more, even a bottleneck can quite easily cause slowdowns throughout the nation. These routes are especially vulnerable because the majority of our cloud-based infrastructure is abroad—so even a slight hiccup in traffic traveling east has catastrophic effects here.
Microsoft Services Outage
Another huge component of this digital disaster puzzle is the continued Microsoft services outage. Widely used applications such as Outlook, Microsoft Teams, and OneDrive have become staples, particularly in a post-COVID era where remote work and digital collaboration are the new normal.
The outage, which appears to be affecting users across the country, is not necessarily the Pakistani ISPs’ fault but rather Microsoft’s own network or service architecture. That being said, the effect on users is guaranteed. Corporate employees are unable to access emails, meetings are being canceled, and crucial files are in cloud limbo.
Since Microsoft’s ecosystem is integrated into business processes and school systems, its downtime is a whole different level of frustration. On top of already sluggish global traffic, users feel they’re being attacked from all directions—local speeds are not that impressive, and global services are not functioning.
Cloudflare-Hosted Services Disruption
As if matters were not complicated enough, Cloudflare-hosted websites and services are also having issues. Cloudflare serves as a protector and turbocharger for millions upon millions of websites worldwide—managing everything from content delivery to security measures. If you’ve ever loaded a site quickly and safely, chances are Cloudflare played a role. But when Cloudflare networks go down or are under stress, the dominoes start falling. Certain websites and applications that are reliant on Cloudflare are either taking agonizingly long to load or failing to load altogether. It is as if one of the world’s top toll booths crashing unexpectedly—the traffic behind it is bound to get jammed. When you overlay Cloudflare problems on top of Microsoft failures and eastbound traffic issues, what you get is an end-user’s worst nightmare. Sites go down, apps timeout, and users scratch their heads wondering if their machines are defective—when the underlying infrastructure is just temporarily busted.