TikTok has around 100 million users in Pakistan, while nearly 150 million videos are watched and uploaded on the platform daily from the country, the National Assembly Standing Committee on Information Technology and Telecommunications was told on Tuesday. The figures, presented during a briefing on social media usage, illustrate the scale of TikTok’s presence in Pakistan and the volume of content generated and consumed on the platform every day.
PTA Chairman Major General (retd) Hafeez ur Rehman shared the figures during the briefing. The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority is the country’s telecom regulator, and its chairman’s presentation to the parliamentary committee provides an official source for the usage figures. The briefing covered social media usage more broadly, but TikTok’s figures were among the most striking presented.
The figure of nearly 150 million videos watched and uploaded daily from Pakistan combines two activities: viewing and uploading. It suggests that Pakistan is not only a large audience for TikTok content, but also a significant producer of content on the platform. The daily volume, on that scale, points to TikTok’s role as a major part of the country’s digital life, used by millions of people for entertainment, information and creative expression.
The committee was also told that 96 million Pakistanis use YouTube and watch around 560 million videos on the platform every day, making Pakistan the world’s leading country in terms of YouTube video viewership, as presented to the committee. That claim — that Pakistan leads the world in YouTube video viewership on a daily basis — is striking, and it was presented to the committee as part of the same briefing. The figure of 560 million videos watched daily dwarfs the TikTok daily figure, reflecting YouTube’s longer-established presence and its wide range of content, from entertainment and music to education and news.
Together, the TikTok and YouTube figures paint a picture of a country in which online video consumption is enormous. With around 100 million TikTok users and 96 million YouTube users, the two platforms together reach a very large share of Pakistan’s population. The daily video counts — 150 million on TikTok and 560 million on YouTube — indicate that video is now a dominant form of media consumption in the country.
The PTA chairman said he had visited 41 districts with telecom operators to assess service quality and inspect towers, and that issuing show-cause notices was a last resort because operators often obtained court stay orders against financial penalties. The visit to 41 districts indicates an effort by the regulator to assess service quality directly, rather than relying solely on operators’ reports. The point about show-cause notices being a last resort, and about stay orders blocking penalties, repeats the enforcement difficulty described in the committee’s other business on Tuesday.
Federal IT Minister Shaza Fatima Khawaja said data consumption had increased significantly due to growing social media and artificial intelligence use. That statement links the surge in video consumption on TikTok and YouTube to a wider trend: as social media and AI applications become more widely used, the amount of data consumed by users rises. That, in turn, places greater demands on telecom networks, which may help to explain why service quality concerns persist even as infrastructure is upgraded.
What happens next will depend on whether the committee’s scrutiny leads to measurable improvements in service quality. The figures presented on Tuesday show a country whose people are embracing online video on a massive scale. The complaints presented alongside those figures show a network infrastructure struggling, in the view of committee members, to keep pace with that demand. Bridging that gap will be the test for the regulator, the operators and the government in the period ahead.
Source: The Express Tribune, 4 November 2026
