After more than a week, popular social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) continues to experience outages in Pakistan, and VPN services are now the next victims.
On the evening of February 17, authorities began to block X after a senior government official admitted to manipulating the election results, triggering a wave of protests across the country.
However, citizens did not give up the opportunity to participate in social media sites easily. They are turning en masse to virtual private networks to spoof their IP addresses and bypass geo-restrictions. Experts estimate that demand for security software has grown by more than 130% since then. Now that many VPN apps have reportedly stopped working, this appears to be yet another escalation in the level of censorship in Pakistan.
Review of record year
“Internet censorship has been increasing alarmingly in Pakistan, and 2024 could be a record year for internet restrictions in the country,” Lina Survila, a spokesperson for VPN provider Surfshark, told TechRadar.
Just two months into the new year, Pakistanis have been plunged into digital darkness five times. The first two strikes this year took place in January, plunging major social media platforms into darkness during an online event organized by PTI, the party led by jailed former Prime Minister Imran Khan.
A month later, authorities cut off internet access during Election Day. The government framed the blackout as a security measure, but it heightened concerns about potential vote manipulation — and, as Alp Toker, founder of internet watchdog NetBlocks, told me at the time, “Pakistani democracy’s Huge setback.”
After Liaqat Ali Chattha, a senior Pakistani bureaucrat, revealed his involvement in election rigging (a claim he later retracted days later), citizens flocked to X to express dissent and organize in the streets . Since then, the government began restricting access to the site without warning or explanation. However, at least so far, Pakistanis have been finding ways to easily bypass these restrictions.
Surfshark’s Survila said: “With reports of VPN restrictions also coming to light, the country appears ready to do whatever is necessary to cut off its citizens from each other and from the rest of the world.”
⚠️ UPDATE: Live indicators show #Pakistan’s X/Twitter restrictions continue into seventh day; With VPN services also subject to widespread restrictions, users are becoming increasingly online as concerns over vote rigging intensify following an election held amid telecom shutdowns It’s getting harder and harder pic.twitter.com/QQdgSwyyuYFebruary 23, 2024
Digital rights advocates at the Islamabad-based group Bytes for All investigated the intensification of government censorship tactics. After some network inspection, they concluded that the blocking of X was achieved through a less common method of HTTP blocking. Experts believe this could indicate existing cooperation between authorities and CDN providers (content delivery networks).
“While the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) can block access to Twitter using methods such as DNS filtering, IP blocking or deep packet inspection (DPI), blocking content from specific CDN providers such as Akamai Technologies can be more challenging, and less common,” the report reads.
If that’s not enough, as we enter day ten of social media lockdown, NetBlocks is also registered Internet connectivity drops in Balochistan region. Trafigura told me that this does not appear to be related to other politically motivated outages at this time.
To be sure, digital freedom is not the only casualty of the ongoing crackdown on the internet.
Pakistan’s economy has also been negatively affected, with the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics recording losses of Rs 1.3 billion last year. In 2023, Pakistan ranked third among the countries with the most internet restrictions. This year, as democratic values appear to be increasingly crumbling, the death toll is likely to be even higher.
Now, VPN service Surfshark urges Pakistani users to contact us if they are unable to use the app as the solution may vary depending on the situation. The provider also recommends that you familiarize yourself with ways to deal with an internet shutdown – you can watch the digital survival toolkit Surfshark has prepared for this in partnership with NetBlocks (video above).
Meanwhile, one of the best free VPN services on the market, Proton VPN – whose VPN registrations have grown steadily throughout the month – believes that its large user base in Pakistan should be able to continue to evade restrictions despite further lockdowns. .
Antonio Cesarano, head of product at Proton VPN, told me: “Proton VPN tends to be more resilient to censorship, including VPN blocking, because we invest heavily in technology to combat censorship in a way that other commercial-only VPNs don’t.”