On a quiet Sunday evening in Kathmandu, as street vendors packed their stalls and families settled into their homes, Nepal’s digital heartbeat suddenly flatlined. Between 9:07 PM and 10:30 PM on Magh 20, 2081, the internet came to a halt – or vanished entirely. For almost 90 minutes, a nation increasingly reliant on digital connectivity held its breath. Students froze, businesses stalled payments, and social media feeds dissolved into error messages. The Nepal Telecommunication Corporation (NTC) swiftly issued a statement on the following day: “Fiber cable breaks at two locations in India” were to blame. A routine technical hiccup, they implied. Nothing more.
But in the silence of disconnected screens, a far more contentious story began to unfold.
The blame game begins
Within hours, the narrative was trying to be woven. While NTC pointed to snapped cables (on the next day), the Internet Service Providers’ Association of Nepal (ISPAN) unleashed a bombshell on the same day: “Airtel cut Nepal’s internet because the national companies as a whole owes them 6 billion rupees.” Sudhir Parajuli, ISPAN’s president, framed the outage not as an accident but as retaliation – a multinational corporation flexing its power over a debt-drowned state. “When the government refuses to pay, Airtel can cut our internet whenever it wants,” he declared, his words dripping with frustration (Quotes referenced from OnlineKhabar article).
Suddenly, the outage transformed from a technical glitch into a political standoff.
Peeling back the layers: Debt, bureaucracy, and digital dependency
The roots of this crisis stretch back two years. Nepal relies on Airtel for majority of its international bandwidth – a lifeline built through undersea cables and Himalayan fiber routes. But according to ISPs, Nepal’s government has withheld payments earmarked for Airtel, citing a bureaucratic tangle over taxes and “repair-maintenance” fees. The state insists ISPs owe royalties and rural development levies; ISPs retort that these charges are illegal, arguing that bandwidth purchases aren’t “telecom services” subject to such fees.
The legal battlefield has already seen casualties. Months earlier, WorldLink – Nepal’s largest ISP – lost a Supreme Court case challenging these fees, forcing it to pay up. Other ISPs, however, continue to resist, arguing the precedent doesn’t bind them.
Caught in the crossfire is Airtel – accused of using its monopoly to punish Nepal. “They cut us off out of anger,” Parajuli claimed, painting Airtel as a creditor turning off the lights. Yet Airtel’s role remains ambiguous: Was the cable break deliberate sabotage, as ISPs imply, or a coincidence magnified by preexisting tensions? The lack of transparency fuels speculation, and in that void, narratives thrive.
For service providers (ISPs & ISPAN), this is a leverage moment. By blaming the government, they rally public anger to pressure officials into fast-tracking payments and reforming punitive policies. Parajuli’s warnings of “catastrophic losses” if outages persist are both an assumption and a threat.
However, behind the spin are ordinary Nepalis, including small businesses losing sales. For them, the “why” matters less than the “when will it end?” Yet the competing narratives makes the solutions unclear. While officials and ISPs clash over blame, Airtel’s infrastructure remains a fragile chain to the global web.
A digital crossroads
This outage is a symptom of a deeper ailment: Nepal’s precarious dependence on foreign bandwidth and a regulatory mix-up slowing progress. As the country champions its Digital Nepal vision, the crisis exposes how easily ambition crumbles when financial disputes and bureaucratic inactivity collide.
In the end, the battle to frame the outage isn’t just about optics – it’s about power. Whoever controls the narrative could shape policies, unlock (or freeze) billions, and determine whether Nepal’s digital future is built on stable ground or shifting sand.
As Parajuli warned, “If the government doesn’t act, Nepal will pay a far steeper price.”
The question now is: Who will the public believe? And more urgently – how will the government act?
All quotes from Sudhir Parajuli referenced from OnlineKhabar article)
