A recent Cloudflare outage that disrupted digital services nationwide has once again underscored Pakistan’s deep dependence on foreign internet infrastructure and highlighted the need for a comprehensive national resilience strategy.
Officials from the Federal Ministry of IT and Telecommunication (ITT) told The Express Tribune that Pakistan maintains a 24/7 vigilance system through the National Cyber Emergency Response Team (NCERT). While the system continuously monitors cyber risks, authorities offered limited clarity on the country’s preparedness for failures originating in global networks. With ITT Minister Shaza Fatima Khawaja abroad, further comment could not be obtained.
Cloudflare—a major U.S.-based provider of cybersecurity and content delivery services—faced a technical fault that rendered numerous essential websites inaccessible, including the Pakistan Stock Exchange, Sindh High Court, X, and OpenAI. The incident slowed browsing speeds and interrupted routine online transactions for millions of users.
Industry specialists noted that although the glitch did not originate in Pakistan, its impact was felt almost instantly, exposing how vulnerable the country remains to disruptions outside its control. IT experts argue that Pakistan must urgently invest in indigenous infrastructure—local data centres, Internet Exchange Points (IXPs), and content-caching systems—to keep critical digital traffic within national borders.
Noman Ahmed Said, CEO of Sai Global, described the outage as evidence of a structural imbalance: Pakistan’s rapid digital expansion has outpaced the infrastructure required to sustain it. Past disruptions—subsea cable faults, regional routing issues, and political shutdowns—have already caused substantial economic losses. In 2024 alone, internet restrictions cost Pakistan an estimated $1.6 billion.
In contrast, P@SHA Chairman Sajjad Syed downplayed the incident, likening it to routine global outages experienced by major platforms like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. He stressed that Pakistan was not at fault and that Cloudflare-dependent websites were temporarily affected like elsewhere in the world.
The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), however, faced criticism for its muted response. While Cloudflare issued detailed updates and apologies, the PTA released only a brief statement acknowledging a “global outage,” offering little guidance to affected users.
Experts now call for a more strategic approach—treating internet access as essential national infrastructure, enforcing stronger redundancy standards, building domestic capacity, and developing a unified cyber-resilience framework. Without such measures, they warn, Pakistan will continue to experience nationwide disruption from even minor international technical failures.