The most common activity to be performed during downtime is to lie down and try not to cry. Well, at least after you gave up clicking “refresh” for a thousand times and finished yelling at the technical support from your service provider. We all know how frightening it can be, to forcefully wander lost in the offline world, so we suggest crying a little after you clicked refresh for one last time. 

Jokes aside, the fact of how important internet connection is in our everyday lives is well-known especially by those who have experienced network downtime. However, many aspects of modern-day living depend heavily on internet connection. Internet is our lifeline of information and is deeply integrated in our lives. Almost unconsciously we turn to the web for many reasons and when we realize we are disconnected we feel disabled and start to panic.

Sadly you can’t read this in the times of crisis because you are disconnected, but let’s assume you prepared yourself well after the first tragedy has past. You can’t prevent an outage but you can surely prepare for one by learning how to handle it.

“Copyright: Unsplash/author: Glenn Carstens / I License: CC0 Public Domain”

Determine the Type of the Outage

There is no possibility whatsoever, for the outages to be fully eliminated. With any internet service provider, outages are bound to happen and due to many different reasons. Different reasons cause different types of disruption. Moreover, you can be experiencing a single issue outage – affecting only you, or a larger scale outage-affecting many people in your area. The first step to resolving the outage problem is to determine the type of disruption you are experiencing.

There are two ways to quickly determine the type of outage:

1. If you happen to use 3G or 4G internet on you mobile phone, reach out to the outage map to check for any reports for disruptions in your area.

· Finding an outage map and an outage chart of your service provider may help you compare your experience with other people in the close area. If it happens to have many reports for blackouts around the same time, you are experiencing a large-scale outage.

2. Call your service provider’s customer service or technical support.

· Support services can give you information if there is a larger-scale outage in your area or a blackout of the provider’s services generally. Sometimes the reason can be a scheduled maintenance work and in this cases they can tell the estimated time for when it is expected the services to be back.

· If you find out that there is no larger scale impact, than you are dealing with a single issue. Support services can be helpful in this stage to guide you through troubleshooting or you can try fixing the problem yourself by following the guidelines listed below.

  “Copyright: Unsplash/author:MIha Feshchak / I License: CC0 Public Domain”

Troubleshooting the Connection Issues

There is a variety of reasons for an outage to happen and there is no possibility to fully eliminate the network blackouts. Therefore, if you already eliminated the possibility of a larger scale impact caused by external factors, the cause for your single issue disruption may be faulty equipment or a temporary problem that occurs in the equipment set-up. Here are some guidelines to try solving the problem yourself:

1. Start by checking your modem. Try unplugging it; wait for 15 seconds, than plug it back in. Wait a couple of minutes before trying to load any pages. Some modems may have a reboot button and this tends to solve many problems in the home network components.

· If all the lights on your modem are flashing, the issue is caused by your service provider or some external factors not your home equipment.

2. Check for any cables and wires that may be plugged in the wrong jack.

3. If any of the mentioned above doesn’t help, you should check for a problem with your IP address. Every time your computer connects to the internet it gets a different IP address and in some cases this may solve your problem. To do this, try refreshing your computer’s internet signal. This reboot may get you back online.

Other most common reasons that can cause a network outage except for an equipment failure are:

· Network congestion

· Operation error

· Failed link to the service provider

· Internet speed fluctuations

· Weather disasters

All these reasons are caused by a third party or directly by your internet service provider. In these cases, you should be patient and wait for the outage problem to be resolved. Outages problems may persist and are very irritating, however, try to be patient and get some of your offline work done.

Business and people which work depends heavily on strong internet connection cannot allow an outage to happen or persist for a longer period of time. Moreover, they may suffer a great financial impact. In most of the cases, people and companies decide to have a backup internet connection.