Internet users across Pakistan may have to put up with slower connections during busy hours until 2 November 2026, after the Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL) confirmed emergency repair work on one of the country’s most important international data routes. The work is being carried out on the Asia-Africa-Europe 1 (AAE-1) submarine cable, on the stretch that runs between Italy and France, and PTCL has warned that customers could notice what it calls minor service degradation while the repairs continue.
The maintenance began on 27 October, according to PTCL, and the company has asked customers for patience until the work is finished. The warning matters because it lands right in the middle of Pakistan’s working week: students submitting assignments, freelancers on client calls, online sellers processing orders and families streaming in the evening all share the same international capacity that the repair work is temporarily squeezing.
PTCL has not put a number on how much slower connections might get, and it has not said whether extra backup bandwidth will be brought in to ease the pressure. What it has said is clear enough, though: expect the effect mainly at peak times, and expect it most on services hosted in Europe. That distinction is worth understanding, because it explains why your connection may feel fine for some things and sluggish for others over the next few days.
What PTCL has announced
PTCL’s announcement, carried on 28 October, says emergency repairs are under way on the AAE-1 system, specifically the section linking Italy and France. Repairs have already started, and the company says users may experience minor degradation in service, mainly during busy hours, until 2 November 2026. It has thanked customers for their patience and cooperation while the work continues.
The wording is deliberately measured. “Minor service degradation” is the language telecom operators use when a route loses some of its capacity but does not go down altogether. In practice, that usually means pages take longer to load, videos drop in quality or buffer, large downloads crawl, and video calls stutter — not a blackout, but a noticeable drag, worst when the most people are online at once.
PTCL has not published a day-by-day repair timetable, nor has it said whether the 2 November date could move. Submarine cable repairs depend on weather, ship availability and the condition of the cable on the seabed, so readers should treat 2 November as the current expected end of the work rather than a guaranteed restoration time. If the date shifts, this article will be updated.
Why a repair in Europe slows down Pakistan’s internet
It sounds odd at first: a fault between Italy and France, thousands of kilometres from Karachi, slowing down a connection in Lahore or Islamabad. The reason is that Pakistan’s internet does not travel in a straight line to each website you open. It travels along a small number of giant undersea cables, and AAE-1 is one of the biggest of them.
Stretching roughly 25,000 kilometres, AAE-1 links Southeast Asia with Europe through Egypt, with a landing point in Karachi. PTCL began operating on the cable in Pakistan in 2017, and its European landing points include Greece, Italy and France. When one section of such a system is under repair, traffic that would normally flow through it has to squeeze through the remaining capacity or take longer alternative routes — and that congestion shows up as slower speeds for users at the far end of the cable, in Pakistan.
The European location of this fault also explains the pattern PTCL described. Services hosted in Europe — many websites, cloud platforms, video services and work tools — are the most likely to feel slow, because their data travels the affected stretch. Services hosted closer to home, or on routes that avoid the repair zone, may feel normal. So two neighbours on the same connection can have very different evenings, depending on what they are opening.
What users will notice during peak hours
The slowdown is expected to bite hardest in the evening, when students are online, offices are wrapping up the day and households settle in to stream. During those hours, users may notice web pages loading slowly, videos pausing to buffer or dropping to lower quality, large files and app updates taking much longer than usual, and video meetings freezing or losing quality.
Online gamers may see higher latency on European servers, and anyone uploading large files — designers sending artwork, editors uploading video, students submitting portfolios — should allow extra time. The effect will not be uniform: it will vary with your internet provider, your package, how congested your local exchange is, and whether the service you are using has alternative routes into Pakistan.
There are a few practical steps worth taking until 2 November. Schedule large downloads and uploads for off-peak hours, such as late at night or early in the morning, when fewer people are competing for capacity. If a video call keeps freezing, switching the camera off or dropping to audio-only can keep the meeting going. Restarting your router once can clear a stale connection, and if home broadband is struggling, a mobile data connection — which may use a different international route — is worth trying for urgent work. None of these fixes the cable, but they can make the next few days easier to live with.
Students, freelancers and small businesses feel it most
For casual browsing, a slower evening is an irritation. For people whose livelihoods depend on a steady connection, it is a real cost. Pakistan’s freelancers, who sell design, writing, software and customer-support services to clients abroad, often work to deadlines set in other time zones; a video call that keeps dropping, or a file that will not upload, can mean a missed delivery. Small online sellers face the same problem at the other end of the day, when evening shoppers are most active.
Students are in a similar position. With assignments, online classes and exam preparation increasingly moving online, an unreliable evening connection lands exactly when study time begins. Universities and colleges that rely on cloud-based learning platforms hosted abroad may find their systems sluggish too, even though nothing is wrong with their own campuses.
Businesses that run their operations through cloud software — accounting, inventory, customer records — may also feel the drag, particularly if their provider’s servers sit in Europe. The sensible move for the next few days is to keep local copies of anything urgent, avoid scheduling critical online-only work for the evening peak where possible, and warn clients or customers early if a deadline could slip. A short message explaining that a national cable repair is under way is far better than a silent delay.
This is not the first time AAE-1 has disrupted Pakistan
Pakistani internet users have been here before. In January 2025, a fault on the AAE-1 system near Qatar slowed speeds across the country for nearly two weeks before PTCL announced that repairs were complete. That episode became a familiar reference point for anyone trying to explain why a cable fault far away can dominate daily life at home — and a reminder that these repairs rarely follow a neat timetable.
The recurrence also underlines a structural point about Pakistan’s connectivity. The country depends on a handful of submarine cables for almost all of its international traffic, so a single fault on one major system is felt nationwide. More cables and more landing points would spread that risk, and Pakistan has been working on additional capacity, but for now the system remains concentrated enough that one repair window in Europe can slow evenings from Karachi to Khyber.
For the moment, the message from PTCL is patience until 2 November. If the repair finishes on schedule, speeds should return to normal without users needing to do anything. If you notice a sharp deterioration — a total loss of service rather than slowness, or problems persisting well beyond 2 November — that is worth reporting to your provider, since it may point to a local fault rather than the cable work. Until then, plan around the evening peak, keep important work backed up locally, and expect the internet to feel a little slower than usual for a few more days.
Related reading on UrduPro: PTCL Group Financial Results 2026 and Best 4G Internet Devices in Pakistan 2026 Compared.
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