KARACHI: Fiverr, one of the largest online freelance marketplaces, has labelled the accounts of several Pakistani service providers as “unavailable” as internet disruptions have impacted their ability to complete their projects on time.

While both freelancers and Fiverr confirmed to Dawn that the accounts had been labelled as unavailable, the latter denied suspending any account.

The action resulted in widespread speculation on social media, with several posts suggesting that the platform has suspended the accounts of Pakistani freelancers who have been facing issues of slow internet speed and disruption in WhatsApp connectivity on mobile data for weeks now.

Three Fiverr users told Dawn.com they received a notification from the platform that their profiles had been made “unavailable” to clients.

Platform denies suspending gig workers, says move aimed at saving workers from negative ratings

“Last week, I received notification on my Fiverr account from Fiverr support telling me that my gigs are made unavailable to clients across the world because Fiverr came to know that there is internet interruption in Pakistan,” Sajid Hussain, a medical content writer based in Punjab, told Dawn.com.

Mr Hussain shared screenshots of the notification sent by Fiverr on Aug 1, which stated: “To make sure any unexpected order delays won’t hurt your ratings, we’re going ahead and temporarily setting your availability status and gig(s) as ‘unavailable’.”

Aiza Shahid, a student from Islamabad, also told Dawn.com about receiving a notification that stated her “account status is considered ‘unavailable’ due to [her] region”. “For the past three years, I’ve been able to use Fiverr without any regional restrictions, so this sudden unavailability was both unexpected and disruptive.”

Pakistan freelancers occupy a large and increasing share of the global gig economy.

According to the University of Oxford’s Online Labour Index — which maintains data on online workers — service providers from Pakistan made up 15.1pc of all freelancers in 2024. The country is only behind India (21.5pc) and Bangladesh (16.1pc).

Software development and technology is the top occupation among Pakistani freelancers with 42pc of the country’s online workforce offering these services.

Fiverr’s response

In response to Dawn’s queries, a Fiverr spokesperson explained that the platform follows a process in situations like “this [internet] outage in Pakistan” to ensure that freelancers are “not getting clients lining up when they are unable to support them”.

“Our process to do this includes issuing a notification [to freelancers]. We did this in early August, first informing freelancers from Pakistan who may have been impacted that we were flagging their account as unavailable…”

Freelancers who are not impacted by the situation can instantly mark their accounts as available, the spokesperson explained, adding that the process to do that has been provided in the notification sent out to freelancers.

While the Fiverr spokesperson didn’t provide the number of accounts that were marked as unavailable or how many have been restored to available, she said the platform started labelling accounts as unavailable from July 31 as soon as it noticed internet outages.

However, most of the flagged accounts “have returned to normal at this time”.

Published in Dawn, August 16th, 2024