Your internet has dropped — what to check first
Check whether it is everyone or one person, then look at the lights on the router before restarting anything. Those two answers tell us more than anything else you can do.
Before you restart anything, spend two minutes on the two questions below. Restarting is often the fix, but it also erases the evidence, and if the problem comes back we will be starting from nothing.
1. Is it everyone, or one person?
Ask a colleague to try. If it is only you, it is your device, your cable or your wireless — not the connection. If it is everyone, it is the connection or the equipment it plugs into.
2. What do the lights on the router say?
Look at the router and write down which lights are on, off, or flashing, and what colour. You do not need to know what they mean; we do. A photo on your phone is perfect and takes five seconds.
3. Now try a restart, in this order
- Unplug the router from power. Not the reset button — just the power.
- Wait a full thirty seconds. This matters: it lets the connection at the other end clear.
- Plug it back in and give it three to five minutes to come back.
- Test again from a computer plugged in by cable if you can, which rules out wireless.
If it is still down, tell us these things
- Whether it affects everyone or one person
- What the router lights are doing (a photo is ideal)
- What time it started, and whether anything changed just before — a power cut, new equipment, building work
- Whether the phones are also affected
That is enough for us to tell the difference between a fault on the line, a problem with the equipment and a wider outage — usually without needing to come out.
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