Uproar as \'firewall\' singes IT businesses

Several businesses and customers, who rely heavily on internet for their work, vociferously opposed the government's decision to install a firewall on the internet that has resulted in the disruption across the country. The Pakistan Software Houses Association (P@SHA) as well as parliamentarians finally broke their silence and spoke against the firewall at a time when the telecom operators were not ready to raise their voice about internet outages. Several freelancers claimed that Fiverr - a big freelancing network - has placed Pakistan in the category of 'unavailable' due to internet outages that indicated to the buyers not to hire services of freelancers from Pakistan. Due to the use of VPN, several freelancers' accounts have been disabled on two major freelancing platforms - Fiverr and Upwork. As a result, these freelancers were in dire situations now. There was no official response from the IT ministry on the installation of the firewall. But Minister of State for IT Shaza Fatima Khawaja later confirmed in her media talk that complaints of slow internet speed because of the firewall had been received.