Government Begins to Restrict VPNs Amid X Shutdown

For the last year or so, internet and social media outages in Pakistan have been on the rise. Even if we look at the last month only, there was an internet outage on election day, and X has been suspended for the last 4-5 days. In such scenarios, netizens resort to other means, such as using VPNs to access restricted sites. However, there is bad news for them. Recently, someone uploaded an image of one of the Reddit communities in which a user was talking to the Surfshark (popular VPN) support. During the conversation, Surfshark said,

Sadly, that is indeed true, the Pakistani government has indeed started to block VPN connections recently, and our engineers are working hard on bypassing the imposed restrictions.

Apart from that, after using X through VPN, we found out that another source posted the same news as you can see in the given image.

Is it a good sign? 

Clamping down on democratic norms and digital freedom isn’t a good sign for a country that is already going through a myriad of problems. Moreover, the increasing frequency of internet and social media outages in the country has raised concerns among netizens about the government’s approach to digital freedom. These outages not only disrupt daily life and communication but also restrict access to essential information.