The small businesses and gig workers paying the price for Pakistan's internet shutdowns

Danish Abdul Razaak, a Karachi-based delivery rider was frantic with worry in May 2023. Not only did he lose over Rs8,000 in four days but watching his children, wife and mother go to bed hungry deeply pained him.

The 32-year-old employee of Bykea - a Pakistani ride-hailing service and parcel delivery company - is dependent on mobile internet to receive and track the locations of his orders. But his work came to a standstill when mobile internet services across the country were suspended to curb the growing protests after the arrest of former Prime Minister Imran Khan. Sites such as Twitter, YouTube and WhatsApp were banned temporarily and access to mobile internet services was restored four days later.

“Things deteriorated rapidly at home. Imagine you are going for your job and one day, you are told that you will have no food in the house because there is no internet,” Danish says, adding that his daily earnings cover the day-today expenses of his family comprising of his wife, mother and two children.

A report by Top10VPN revealed that Pakistan endured the world’s highest economic losses from internet outages in 2024 which amounted to $1.62 billion. According to a report by Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE), online food delivery services report a 75% reduction in the number of orders and online cab services report a 97% reduction in the number of rides.

29-year-old Soha Yaseen is the founder Sowears, a popular clothing brand operating in Pakistan and the UAE. Since 2018, the brand has experienced an extraordinary surge in growth, rapidly expanding its presence and influence in the market. It boasts eight retail outlets and a combined 831,000 followers on Instagram and Facebook. However, frequent internet disruptions present tough challenges to the brand’s continued success.

During internet shutdowns, despite significant investments in Facebook and Google ads, Sowears witnesses over a 20% decline in online orders. “There is a huge chunk of orders that come in a day. You can say a whole day’s profit is like gone out of nowhere (during shutdowns),” Soha says. She adds that disruption of internet services is “saddening” particularly given that small to medium-sized businesses heavily depend on social media platforms for advertisements and because delivery services are halted, there is a delay in orders too.

Similar tales of financial setback echo across other businesses as they too report large losses. Nofal Khan, founder of SwagKicks, an online marketplace for pre-owned clothing calls internet suspensions his “biggest fear” adding that shutdowns have led to the loss of thousands of dollars in losses. Even if customers could access the website, excruciatingly slow internet speeds contribute to them logging off before they can complete the purchase. “Our website was not loading for 8 seconds. (Normally) the website gets fully loaded in 1.5 seconds. So, of course, it would have contributed to the frustration of the customer,” says the 35-year-old founder.

Pakistan has had a history of shutting the internet for a myriad of reasons. The country was ranked third in the world over the imposition of internet restrictions, with over 20 internet shutdowns reported in 2025.The longest internet shutdown that Access Now tracked occurred in Pakistan where 4.5 million residents of the Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA) had to brave a nearly four year-long internet shutdown from 2016 to 2021.

Digital instability in Pakistan is also a huge deterrent for investor confidence, especially for companies trying to secure funding.

“For investors to see that they are putting their money behind businesses that could at any given day…be impacted by something that they have absolutely no control over and that should never be tampered with was a shock,” says Sennen Desouza, Co-founder of Investor’s Lounge, a stock market education and intelligence platform. “Instances like these make investors lose further confidence, which is the least thing required in a burgeoning ecosystem that’s just finding grounds.”

Pakistani businesses are compelled to explore adaptive measures to sustain their operations in case of future internet suspensions. During certain days when internet suspension is predicted, Nofal and Soha scale down or halt their business’s expenditures on social media advertisements. This has also pushed Soha to diversify her brand to foreign markets and to reduce reliance on Pakistan as the sole driver of her business.

“This is kind of a loss, which I think we cannot do anything about. The best thing we can do about our business is that we can increase it internationally and not rely on one source that is Pakistan,” Soha says. 20% of the brand’s orders originate from international markets and Soha expresses her goals to further boost global presence.

Pakistan is among the world’s top five freelancing markets with over 3 million freelancers. Although the Pakistani government has rolled out several incentives for freelancers, these efforts are futile if there is no internet, the most crucial necessity for online work. Previously, Fiverr - a freelance services marketplace - temporarily barred Pakistani freelancers from accessing gigs on the platform.

“It’s a perpetuity. It’s not just the nature of the contract that I’m losing, I’m losing future work as well because that client is going to say: you are unreliable as a vendor for no reason of my own, nothing under my control,” says Sennen.

Internet access is a necessity. It is posited that lack of internet access causes anxiety and for good reason: Our reliance on the internet is evident in the completion of everyday tasks, ranging from food delivery and ride-hailing to sourcing groceries, highlighting its crucial role in day-today functioning. Behaviour modification due to massive digitisation has taken years to develop. It is not possible to move towards change overnight, given frequent internet suspensions.

“People have made fundamental changes to their lifestyle based on the assumption that internet will never be disrupted,” says Sennen. “The dependence on remembering routes and landmarks has gone down generally because you are able to access Google maps. Now you’re asking me to reach a location without the help of maps. That’s going to be a massive challenge now that over many months, I had already begun to outsource that process to Google maps.”