By Staff Reporter
KARACHI: The internet service provider Stormfiber said on Friday its services would be fully restored by Monday after disruptions over the past week caused by faults in undersea cables.
The company said it had already restored more than 60 percent of the lost capacity by activating additional bandwidth on alternate routes. “We expect to fully recover the lost capacity within 72 hours (by 11:59pm on Monday, 27 October 2025),” it said in a statement. “We are continuing to add more capacity and reroute traffic to improve peak-time performance, with newly procured bandwidth coming online via UAE, Oman, and Hong Kong.”
“Incremental capacity will be added in staged activations prior to that, so many customers will experience noticeable improvement before then,” the statement added. Stormfiber said its teams were working round the clock with international partners to restore full performance and resilience.
The announcement came after internet users across Pakistan complained on October 20 of service degradation and slow browsing speeds on certain ISPs.The disruptions were attributed to a fault in a submarine cable, but there was no initial statement or acknowledgment from the ISPs concerned, the IT ministry or the regulator, the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA). When approached for comment, IT Minister Shaza Fatima Khawaja attributed the problem to a global shutdown of Amazon cloud services. However, many internet users said they had been informed by their ISP that services were suffering due to cable damage.
Detailing the outage, Stormfiber said: “Over the past few months, several regional submarine cables that carry much of the country’s traffic, including IMEWE and SEA-ME-WE4 have experienced outages.” The PEACE cable system originates in China and connects to Pakistan.
According to the PTA, the cables landing in the country are operated by PTCL, Cybernet and TransWorld Associates. Three undersea cable networks operated by the PTCL are AAE-1 (Africa, Asia and Europe), SMW4 (South-East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe) and the IMEWE (India-Middle East-Western Europe). “To mitigate the impact on our users, the Cybernet Network Operations team proactively procured additional submarine capacity on alternate paths, including the PEACE cable,” the Stormfiber statement said. But on October 20 at approximately 5:30pm, “the PEACE cable also suffered a cut in the Red Sea near Sudan,” it said. “This caused evening peak-time congestion and intermittent slowdowns for our users,” the company added. Internet users in Pakistan often face disruptions due to persistent submarine cable faults.
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