Digital Blackout How a PTCL Fault in Karachi Silenced the Entire Pakistan Offline
If you found yourself staring at a blank screen, unable to connect to the internet anywhere in Pakistan today, you weren’t alone. A massive outage knocked out a huge chunk of the country’s online services, leaving millions of people disconnected.
So, what happened?
The trouble started in Karachi, where intense storms and heavy rain hit the city hard. This seems to have crippled the main infrastructure of PTCL and its mobile service, Ufone.
But since PTCL acts as the backbone for many other internet providers, its problem quickly became everyone’s problem. When PTCL went down, it took a lot of other services with it. That’s why people using Jazz, Zong, and Telenor also found their data services suddenly stopped working.
Just how bad was it? According to Netblocks, a global group that monitors the internet, Pakistan’s connectivity plummeted to just 20% of its normal capacity. That’s a massive drop that effectively cut the country off from the digital world.
Official sources are trying to piece together the exact cause. PTCL confirmed the issue and said their teams were working hard to fix things. However, some officials in the IT Ministry believe the problem is a major technical glitch at a critical submarine cable landing station located in Karachi. Think of it as the main highway for internet traffic getting blocked at the entrance.
The IT Minister also pointed to other issues caused by the storm, like power cuts that shut down mobile towers. On top of that, with so many people stranded by the flooding and trying to call for help at the same time, the remaining phone networks became completely jammed.
For people on the ground in Karachi, the situation was more than just an inconvenience; it was scary. With urban flooding trapping people on the streets, the loss of phone and internet service meant families couldn’t contact each other to make sure they were safe.
As repair crews work to bring the country back online, this event is a stark reminder of how a single point of failure, combined with severe weather, can disconnect an entire nation.
