When your ISP is down

When your internet goes and it turns out to be the provider, there is very little you can do about it. What you can do is establish that quickly, so you stop troubleshooting equipment that is working perfectly and get on with a workaround.

Confirming it

1. Check the router lights

The single fastest signal. A line light that is off or red means the physical connection to your provider is gone - That is unambiguously theirs. On cable, a blinking or orange downstream light means the modem cannot lock onto a channel. On fibre, a red LOS light means the optical signal is absent.

If the line light is healthy and only the internet light is wrong, the line is fine and the fault is in the provider's session handling or further upstream. The full guide to reading the lights.

2. Try mobile data

A completely separate network. If mobile works and your fixed line does not, the fault is on the fixed line - And you also now have a working internet connection to investigate with.

3. Check the provider's outage tool

Every major provider has one, and it takes your address, which matters enormously. Outages are localised and a national status page tells you nothing useful; an address lookup tells you whether your specific node is affected.

Most also offer to text you when service is restored, which is more reliable than checking repeatedly.

4. Check whether other people are reporting it

Report volume clustering in your area is strong confirmation, particularly for mobile networks where providers rarely acknowledge anything publicly. Xfinity, Spectrum, Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile each have a page here for exactly this.

Why your neighbour is fine

This causes more disbelief than any other aspect of ISP outages, and the explanation is architectural.

Cable is shared infrastructure. Customers on the same node share upstream capacity, and a fault at that node affects a specific set of streets. Two houses a mile apart can be on different nodes and have completely different experiences.

Fibre is usually point-to-point or split within a small area, so faults tend to be either very local or very wide with little in between.

Mobile is per-tower and per-sector. You can walk two hundred metres and reconnect to a different tower that is working fine.

This is also why the first-line support script is unhelpful. The agent sees a network that is mostly healthy and no ticket for your area, and works through the standard checks - Because from their view, nothing is wrong.

What to do while you wait

Tether

A phone hotspot is a genuine internet connection. Modern mobile networks handle video calls and remote work adequately. Watch the data allowance: Video streaming is what burns it, and pausing cloud backup and system updates on any device you connect makes a large difference.

Know what still works

Downloaded media plays. Documents cached locally open. Anything with offline support keeps working and syncs later. It is worth knowing in advance which of your tools have genuine offline modes and which are browser applications that stop dead - The difference only becomes apparent when you need it.

Do not reconfigure anything

Changing DNS servers, resetting the router to factory defaults, or reinstalling drivers during a provider outage achieves nothing and leaves you with a broken configuration to untangle afterwards. Particularly avoid the reset pinhole, which erases your settings and sometimes the provisioning too.

Reporting it

Report the fault even if the outage tool already knows. Confirmed customer reports from an address help locate a fault, and they establish a record for a credit later.

Use the app or the website rather than the phone line during a large outage - The phone queue will be hours and the app reports the same information. Ask for a text notification on restoration.

Credits

Most providers will credit you for a significant outage, and almost none will do it automatically. You have to ask, usually after service is restored, and usually within a defined window.

What helps: The dates and times, a reference number if you reported it, and a specific request rather than a general complaint. The credit is normally prorated against the monthly fee, so a day of downtime is worth a small amount - But it takes five minutes and it is money you are entitled to.

For business connections with a service level agreement, the process is more formal and the amounts larger, but the principle is identical: Credits are claimed, not granted. How SLA credits actually work.

If it keeps happening

Repeated short outages are a different problem from one long one, and they are harder to get taken seriously because each individual event is minor.

Keep a log: Date, time, duration, and what the router lights showed. A written record of twelve outages in a month is considerably more persuasive than a description of "it keeps dropping", and it is usually what gets a technician sent out rather than another remote reset.

Intermittent faults on older copper are frequently water in a joint, which is why they correlate with rain. On cable, they are often signal levels that are marginal rather than failed - A technician can read those from the modem and they are a concrete thing to point at.