Belkin announced that it has fixed the massive Internet outage that many of its customers around the world experienced on Oct. 7, but the company did not bother offering an explanation as to what caused the meltdown.
Starting at around midnight PDT, troves of Belkin users took to Twitter to complain that they were unable to connect to the Internet via their own routers. Internet service providers, including Comcast and Time-Warner Cable, redirected troves of disgruntled customers grumbling about their non-existent Internet to Belkin. At around 9:30 a.m., Belkin acknowledged the service disruption and said its technical team is "diligently working to root cause the issue."
Speculation abounds that the problem was due to a buggy firmware update, but users on Reddit said they were still unable to connect to the Internet even with automatic updates turned off on their router
More than an hour after acknowledging the issue, Belkin issued a workaround to allow them to get online by using public DNS servers, such as Google's public DNS with addresses 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.8.4. This suggests that the outage was due to a DNS problem since the routers were able to pick up the DNS settings from DCHP but could not resolve domain names properly.
However, Belkin's workaround did not resolve the issue for some customers. One user nicknamed mojofilter said on Reddit that "setting my customer's PC's DNS to our DNS or Google's (8.8.8.8) has had no effect. Still can't get online."
"Tried that as well as it didn't work," says another user named akashik. "The only way I've managed to get this computer back online was to connect it directly to the modem, avoiding the router. That won't work for long with a wife and daughter in need of Wi-Fi."
Belkin was finally able to issue what looks to be a permanent fix at around 3 p.m., advising its customers to unplug and re-plug their routers to restore service.
"We have confirmed that the Internet connectivity issue is now resolved," says Belkin in an update page for the issue. "If your service has not yet been restored, please unplug your router and plug it back in after waiting 1 minute. Wait 5 more minutes and the router should reconnect."
Customers who are still experiencing problems are encouraged to call the Belkin support hotline at (800) 223-5546. The issue has affected older Belkin models that support Wi-Fi 802.11n, including F9K1102, F9K1105, F9K1113 and F9K1116.
