Tag: Fix

Internet Down Again? Here Are 5 Possible Causes and How to Fix Them

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There’s hardly a good time for your internet to go out, but it always seems to happen at the worst possible time. Maybe you’re streaming the finale of your favorite TV show, closing in on a rare victory online or taking an important work call from home and, sure enough, there goes the internet. Even the best Wi-Fi connections can go out from time to time and may require a bit of troubleshooting to get back online.

Resolving the occasional service disruption is usually fairly quick and simple. Here are the most common reasons why your internet might go out and how to fix the problem, if possible. Spoiler alert: It’s not always the fault of your internet service provider.

Shopping for a faster internet speed?

We’ll send you the fastest internet options, so you don’t have to find them.

(For more Wi-Fi tips, check out why your router may be in the wrong place and how to find free Wi-Fi anywhere in the world.) 

Common causes of home internet outages

Here are some of the top causes your internet may have dropped — we’ll dive into solutions for each below.

1. Modem/router malfunctions

CNET Home Tips logo

2. Inadequate speeds or equipment

3. Hacking or network issues

4. Bad weather

5. ISP service outages and network congestion

Narrowing down the exact issue can take a bit of investigating and troubleshooting. Start by verifying the connection issue isn’t specific to a single website, server or device. 

If you’ve lost your Netflix connection halfway through a show, check to see if other streaming services are still accessible and working. If so, the problem likely lies with Netflix and not your internet connection. If you’re having an issue connecting to other streaming services, it could be that the smart TV or streaming device is to blame. Try streaming on another device, if possible, to verify that an internet outage is the culprit.

Linksys Hydra Pro 6 router on a yellow background
Ry Crist/CNET

When your home internet connection goes out, it’s most likely due to a hiccup with your modem and/or router. The solution is often simple: Restart your equipment by unplugging it, waiting 10 seconds or so, plugging it back in and allowing it to reboot. More often than not, this will resolve your outage.

When restarting your router, I’d recommend cutting power by unplugging it instead of pressing or holding any buttons on the device itself. Doing so can prompt the device to do a hard reset, returning it to factory settings and erasing your Wi-Fi network settings. Granted, the reset will likely re-establish your internet connection, but you’ll also have the extra task of setting up your Wi-Fi again.

Also, keep in mind that your device may have a battery backup. If the lights on your modem or router don’t go out when you unplug it from the power source, check to see if there are batteries installed somewhere and temporarily remove them when restarting your device. 

Laptop Internet Speed Test
Sarah Tew/CNET

Inadequate speeds or equipment

Maybe your internet isn’t necessarily “out,” it

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5 Reasons Why Your Wi-Fi Is Down and How to Fix It

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This story is part of Home Tips, CNET’s collection of practical advice for getting the most out of your home, inside and out.

There’s really never a good time for your Wi-Fi to go out: Whatever you’re using the internet for at the time (streaming TV, gaming online, working from home or some combination of it all) comes to an abrupt and frustrating halt. An internet outage could also knock your Wi-Fi security cameras, smart light switches and other connected devices offline even when you’re away — not ideal.

While there’s not much you can do about an internet outage when you’re away from home, troubleshooting and resolving the occasional service disruption can be fairly quick and simple. Here are the most common reasons why your internet might go out and how to fix the problem, if possible. Spoiler alert: It’s not always the fault of your internet service provider. (For more Wi-Fi tips, check out why your router may be in the wrong place, and how to find free Wi-Fi anywhere in the world.) 

Most common causes of home internet outages

Here are some of the top causes your internet may have dropped — we’ll dive into solutions for each below.

Shopping for a faster internet speed?

We’ll send you the fastest internet options, so you don’t have to find them.

1. Modem/router malfunctions

CNET Home Tips logo

2. Inadequate speeds or equipment

3. Hacking or network issues

4. Bad weather

5. ISP service outages and network congestion

Narrowing down the exact issue can take a bit of investigating and troubleshooting. Start by verifying the connection issue isn’t specific to a single website, server or device. 

If you’ve lost your Netflix connection halfway through a show, check to see if other streaming services are still accessible and working. If so, the problem likely lies with Netflix and not your internet connection. If you’re having an issue connecting to other streaming services, it could be that the smart TV or streaming device is to blame. Try streaming on another device, if possible, to verify that an internet outage is the culprit.

Ry Crist/CNET

When your home internet connection goes out, it’s most likely due to a hiccup with your modem and/or router. The solution is often simple: Restart your equipment by unplugging it, waiting 10 seconds or so, plugging it back in and allowing it to reboot. More often than not, this will resolve your outage.

When restarting your router, I’d recommend cutting power by unplugging it instead of pressing or holding any buttons on the device itself. Doing so can prompt the device to do a hard reset, returning it to factory settings and erasing your Wi-Fi network settings. Granted, the reset will likely re-establish your internet connection, but you’ll also have the extra task of setting up your Wi-Fi again.

Also, keep in mind that your device may have a battery backup. If the lights on your modem or router don’t go out when

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The most common Wi-Fi problems and how to fix them

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We’ve grown so accustomed to Wi-Fi being readily available for listening to music, streaming our favorite shows, and allowing us to work from home that we rarely think twice about being connected until we’re suddenly experiencing a Wi-Fi problem.

A loss of connection is disruptive to a daily routine, but most Wi-Fi issues are easy to fix, so you can get reconnected relatively quickly. When your Wi-Fi goes down, you can restore access on your own by troubleshooting some of these common problems.

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Slow or no internet access in certain rooms

Casezy/Getty Images

Wi-Fi is radio waves, meaning your Wi-Fi router broadcasts in all directions from a central location. If your router is in a far corner of your house, then you’re covering a great deal of the outside world unnecessarily. If you can, move your router to a more centralized location. The closer you can put your router to the center of your coverage area, the better reception will be throughout your house.

If you have external antennas, you can try adjusting those, too. Alternating between fully vertical and fully horizontal positions can help it reach in multiple directions.

If you live in an apartment building, other routers might be interfering with yours. Free software, like NetSpot on Mac, Windows, and Android or Wi-Fi Analyzer for Android, can show you every wireless network nearby and what channel they’re using. If your router overlaps with nearby networks in particular rooms, consider switching to a less congested channel. If you need help switching to a less congested channel, be sure to visit our guide on changing the channel on your wireless router.

If none of that helps, your home might be too much for one router to handle. Consider purchasing a wireless repeater or setting up an old router to serve as one to extend the range of your main router. Upgrading to a whole-home mesh wireless system can also help with dead spots in certain areas of your home.

Slow internet everywhere

If your Wi-Fi speed is slow no matter where you are, try plugging a laptop into your modem directly and test your internet speed using a site like speedtest.net. If speeds are still down, the problem is likely with your internet connection, not your router. Contact your ISP.

If that’s not the issue, it could be that your current wireless channel is overcrowded by your devices or by those of other nearby networks. Consider changing the channel on your router in your router settings. Each router brand does that a little differently, though.

If that doesn’t help, performing a factory reset on your router and setting it up again may help. On most routers, there’s a Reset button that you can hold down with a paperclip, but we also have a guide if you need further help on resetting your router. Do so for 30 seconds, and the router should default to factory settings. Use our guide to setting up a wireless router to get

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The EU Has a Prepare to Fix Net Privacy: Be A lot more Like Apple

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Like tens of millions of other internet people in Europe, when Alexandra Geese, a German member of the European Parliament (MEP), would like to study some thing on the online, she initially has to open up and scroll by several choices to refuse to share her facts with third-party advertisers. Europe’s landmark privacy legislation, the Standard Info Security Regulation (GDPR), suggests internet websites have to check with end users for consent to be tracked on line. But many companies make refusing consent significantly harder than granting it, that means Geese’s look for to opt out can choose more time than she intended to devote on a web-site. “The difficulty with the present-day GDPR is that it really is not getting enforced thoroughly and therefore men and women never have a true alternative,” she claims.

Geese is amongst the European lawmakers presently drafting some of the world’s strictest procedures against know-how businesses in an endeavor to take care of the choose-out perform of the web.

As MEPs pondered how to give that serious preference to European world-wide-web consumers in January, an present program made by Apple was presented as a probable template for reshaping the web. In 2021, the tech huge introduced a new privateness pop-up that it reported would give consumers a genuine alternative about whether or not they want to be tracked. The attribute gives Iphone customers two incredibly straightforward options when they obtain new apps—“Ask App Not To Track” or “Allow.” Data that confirmed up to 98 per cent of Apple iphone users took this prospect to choose out ended up taken as evidence by some MEPs that persons would opt for to defend their privacy if they had the opportunity. “I actually believe that privateness shouldn’t only be an solution for people today who can pay for high quality units or premium Apple products and solutions,” suggests German MEP Tiemo Wölken, from the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats.

Photograph: Christoph Dernbach/Getty Photographs

Now European lawmakers want to apply Apple’s idea across all main on the internet platforms—a definition that contains on-line marketplaces, application outlets, and social media platforms—and pressure them to display screen easy possibilities when folks first take a look at a web site. On January 20, a bulk of MEPs voted in favor of an amendment to the Electronic Companies Act (DSA), which mentioned that refusing consent for ad monitoring need to be no much more tough or time-consuming than supplying it. Another amendment proposes banning dim patterns—design choices that attempt to influence a user to consent to tracking. For proposals to make it into the final model of the DSA, they should be approved by the European Council, which signifies heads of governing administration in the 27 member states. If proposals endure these negotiations, they could turn into law as quickly as the conclude of this yr.

But latest revelations about Apple’s at the time-lauded technique clearly show it is not the very clear-minimize alternative EU lawmakers could have hoped for. It is

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Web3 Can’t Fix the Internet

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If you believe the hype, Web3 is the next inevitable generation of the Internet — a way for developers and startups to take back control from big corporate platforms. Investor and Web3 advocate Chris Dixon claims that, in the blockchain-based Web3, “ownership and control is decentralized” and digital tokens will give everyone “the ability to own a piece of the internet.”

Web 2.0 ended the previous era of static, read-only GeoCities pages, bringing us social media, apps, and platform companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook — behemoths that users are now turning against. Web3 is meant to combine the best of both: the open and decentralized architecture of Web 1 with the functionality and value-creating nature of Web 2.0. We can all get rich and “the man” won’t be there to steal our data or tell us what to do.

But if Web3 is sometimes depicted as anti-capitalist, this couldn’t be further from the truth. The vast majority of the tech developed in this space is designed to make more money for a few, and certainly not to empower most of us. The utopian rhetoric around freedom, decentralization, and an ownership economy might help investors sleep at night. But at its core, it’s just a way of selling a new generation of products to the public.

To the extent that it will redistribute power, Web3 surely could shift attention from one group of tech companies to another. But ultimately, it’s offering a technical fix for a political problem: who owns the internet. To insert digital token systems into online communities will only further intensify the existing monetization of digital spaces and continue the capitalist drive of commodification. To really break from this logic, we need a form of platform socialism that would support the development of digital tools as public goods — free and available for all to use.

Web3 is coming, and the plan is to build it on the blockchain — publicly accessible distributed ledgers maintained by participants that support cryptonetworks such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. New transaction data written onto the blockchain is immutable and can be verified by all parties, facilitating trustless interactions and automating basic functions that usually require a bank or financial authority.

The number one selling point of Web3 is that it will decentralize the web. This will supposedly allow people more privacy and control over their online experience, while enabling a more egalitarian distribution of value. The main players behind the “movement” are venture capitalists and cryptobros, but it also has its fair share of well-meaning developers and enthusiasts interested in building better products. It’s hard to tell the genuine interest from the self-serving hype, not least given the suspicious number of Medium articles written by venture capitalists talking about wresting power from corporations and giving it back to “the people.”

This is connected to the reason Web3 went viral in 2021: it excites people who are

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