Thousands Lose Internet Over Weekend In Magic Valley

Friday night around 5 PM people across the United States unexpectedly began losing internet service. For most the interruption didn't last very long but for many the outage lasted days. Some may still be without internet service and there may be a simple reason why. Your router is outdated.

I was one of those who lost internet and never got it back. We went an entire weekend living in the stone age at my house. We watched old VHS tapes and DVD's since we couldn't stream anything on our TV's. We pulled the power multiple times and tried the reset button a number of times too, but nothing worked. We constantly checked the Down Detector website to see if it was just us or a bigger issue. That's how we learned that this was a much bigger issue than just my house or even just our area. Between 5 and 6 on Friday evening the number of issues reported jumped to more than 2,100 households.

Since there were so many other reports we didn't call our ISP since we figured they already knew there was an issue and our call would just be extra noise. By Sunday night we decided enough was enough and called. After a 15 minute call we were back up and running. The help on the phone had me run through a few authentication steps for the modem, all the while she was telling me I may need to get a new modem since mine was from 2013. She told us the reason we lost internet and never got it back was due to them updating their main servers and our old router not being compatible anymore without the update (that was the authentication steps she was waling us through). I guess we got lucky that our old equipment is still playing nice with their new tech, for now.

People across the United States are still reporting issues at Down Detector, though not as many as over the weekend. If you are in the same boat as us and the internet hasn't turned back on, give your service provider a call. It may be something simple like our situation.