PESHAWAR: Afghan traders in Pakistan’s northwestern city of Peshawar say their businesses and family ties have been thrown into disarray after Taliban authorities imposed a sweeping Internet blackout across their homeland earlier this week.
Internet connectivity in Afghanistan has dropped to less than one percent of normal levels, according to watchdog NetBlocks, after Taliban supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada ordered the shutdown “until further notice” to combat what officials called “vice.”
The outage has worsened conditions in one of the world’s poorest and most war-torn countries, already reeling from decades of conflict, humanitarian crises and a recent earthquake, rights groups said.
“We have big businesses with hotels [in Afghanistan],” Hajji Khan Muhammad, a kitchenware trader at Peshawar’s Board Bazaar near the Afghan border, said. “But our customers, they don’t buy [our products] until we send them pictures.”
He noted that these days businesses are mainly conducted online, with the whole world relying on the Internet.
Other Afghan traders said the blackout had left them unable to recover their payments or speak to their families.
“We can’t talk to our customers,” said Aslam, another Afghan trader who only shared his first name. “We can’t communicate with each other or build relations.”
Abdullah Jan, another Afghan national in the market, said the disruption had cut off vital family contact.
“Everyone is upset,” he continued. “We have relatives, some are someone’s brothers, uncles, some are someone’s mothers, sisters. We were in contact with each other. Now that the Internet is down, communication is also dead.”
Others warned the outage was straining cross-border commerce.
“We are businessmen and we have trades and businesses set up there. They ask us for the items and owe us money. We don’t have visas to go and get our money back from them,” said Javed Khan.
The United Nations has warned of a “very dire situation” with “serious human rights ramifications.”
Aid agencies say the blackout will prevent Afghan women from accessing online education programs, cut remittances and censor media.
At the beginning of 2025, around 13.2 million Afghans – roughly 30 percent of the population – had Internet access, according to the specialist website DataReportal, with more than four million social media users.
Kabul had previously touted its 9,350-kilometer fiber optic network as a way to lift the country out of poverty.
