Foreign tech reliance exposed

KARACHI:

The recent Cloudflare outage that disrupted services across Pakistan has highlighted the country's heavy reliance on foreign digital infrastructure, underscoring the urgent need for a national preparedness strategy.

When contacted, officials at the Federal Ministry for IT and Telecommunication (ITT) told The Express Tribune that the Government of Pakistan has a robust vigilance system under the National Cyber Emergency Response Team (NCERT). The NCERT monitors systems 24/7 to ensure safety.

On the failure of foreign Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) exposing Pakistan to digital vulnerability and the risk of an absolute halt, an official said Pakistan's own infrastructure is resilient but interconnected with global networks. "Hence, a global outage naturally affects Pakistan." The official, however, did not explain Pakistan's preparedness for such vulnerabilities.

ITT Minister Shaza Fatima Khawaja was on an official foreign trip and could not be reached.

Cloudflare, a US company whose services include defending millions of websites against malicious attacks, experienced a technical glitch that prevented internet users from accessing several vital websites. Many users complained about slow browsing and denied access to critical sites like the Pakistan Stock Exchange, the Sindh High Court, X and OpenAI, as those too went down.

Sector specialists told The Express Tribune that the Cloudflare outage did not just disrupt services; it exposed how thin Pakistan's digital foundations remain. IT architects and network engineers said Pakistan's heavy dependence on foreign CDN and routing layers leaves even local platforms vulnerable to failures occurring outside the country.

They argued that Pakistan urgently needs stronger domestic infrastructure, including locally hosted services, regional Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) and deeper investments in data centres so critical traffic remains within national borders instead of relying on distant networks.

Noman Ahmed Said, Sai Global CEO, said that when Cloudflare, one of the world's largest internet infrastructure companies, suffered a technical failure on November 18, the impact rippled across continents within minutes. Pakistan felt it immediately. Websites halted, online transactions slowed and digital services struggled to stay online.

The failure did not originate in Pakistan. It was triggered by a faulty internal file inside Cloudflare's global network. "But the speed with which it brought parts of Pakistan's digital ecosystem to a standstill revealed a larger, uncomfortable truth that we remain dangerously dependent on foreign platforms without building our own layers of resilience," he added.

Recalling similar events, he said this was not the first time. Over the past two years, Pakistan has faced a series of disruptions. In January 2025, an AAE-1 undersea cable fault slowed nationwide internet traffic. In August 2025, a major disturbance left the country operating at only 20% connectivity. In September 2025, regional cable cuts disrupted South Asian routes. In 2024, political shutdowns and platform blocks further affected digital services.

"These repeated incidents show a structural issue mirroring that our digital growth has outpaced the infrastructure needed to support it."

Economic toll

Said noted that short disruptions may seem harmless, but they carry real economic costs. Online banking, e-commerce, remote work and public services are affected.

In 2024 alone, Pakistan lost an estimated $1.6 billion due to internet restrictions and shutdowns, impacting over 80 million users. Daily suspensions can cost over Rs1.3 billion in lost productivity.

The Cloudflare outage lasted only hours, yet it demonstrated how a small global technical glitch can cascade into national-level consequences.

In contrast, Pakistan Software Houses Association (P@SHA) Chairman Sajjad Syed maintained that Cloudflare experienced a temporary global issue affecting only the sites that rely on it, while non-Cloudflare sites remained unaffected. He said this is normal, just as when Microsoft Teams goes down while Google remains operational.

Cloudflare is widely used, but alternatives such as Akamai, Fastly, AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure exist. He emphasised that this is not a failure on Pakistan's part, noting that even major platforms including Google, Facebook, Instagram and Microsoft have experienced outages. He said a recent Microsoft outage disrupted several US airlines and companies.

While millions of users across the country experienced disruption, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) remained conspicuously indifferent. At a time when Cloudflare acknowledged its failure and issued an apology, the PTA issued only a brief, perfunctory press statement, failing to address the scale of inconvenience or offer meaningful guidance. This response highlighted regulatory apathy and raised questions about Pakistan's claims of digital resilience and preparedness for large-scale disruptions.

A PTA spokesperson stood by the press release, which stated the authority was closely monitoring a major global outage affecting X (Twitter) and Cloudflare. The statement added that PTA was in contact with global platforms and local operators and would continue to observe the situation until services were fully restored. "This is our stance," she said.

What's next?

Said suggested that internet access should be treated as national infrastructure, deserving the same priority as power, water and transport. He said the PTA must strengthen regulatory focus by shifting from content policing to enforcing network resilience, redundancy requirements and transparent outage reporting.

He said Pakistan also needs stronger domestic capacity through investments in internet exchange points, local data centres, content caching and cloud edge nodes. "Finally, the country should create a national cyber-resilience framework that defines critical services, assigns responsibilities and conducts national-level simulations," he added.

"If Pakistan keeps reacting to outages instead of preparing for them, every global glitch will feel like a national crisis. Resilience, not firefighting, is the way forward," he concluded.

In 2023, the World Economic Forum's annual meeting ended with a stark warning after its Global Cybersecurity Outlook report revealed that 93% of surveyed experts expect a "catastrophic" cyberattack within two years. This catalysed an internet conspiracy theory that a so-called 'collapse' is near.

Local experts, however, dismissed the theory saying a complete collapse is extremely unlikely because the internet is decentralised and built with strong redundancy.

"Whenever a major outage occurs, social media revives theories about a 'global internet shutdown' in 2026 or 2028. These ideas are often sparked by misunderstandings of global cyber-risk discussions," Said commented.