Belkin has solved the problem that prevented some of its routers from connecting to the Internet with an easy fix: Just reboot them.
For some unknown reason—most likely a firmware update, but this hasn’t yet been confirmed—several models of Belkin routers refused to connect to the Internet on Tuesday morning. The balky routers included older 802.11n models, such as the F9K1102, F9K1105, F9K1113, and F9K1116.
A Belkin spokeswoman said via email, however, that the company has fixed the issue.
“We have confirmed that the internet connectivity issue is now resolved,” she said. “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. If you have any further issues, please contact our support at (800) 223-5546. We sincerely apologize for this inconvenience to our customers. We are taking a number of actions to eliminate this sort of incident from reoccurring.”
Belkin hasn’t yet said what the root cause of the outage was, however, or what actions the company would take to prevent the issue from happening again.
Note that while Belkin has solved the problem, using Google’s DNS servers (the fix suggested by Belkin) should still work. In other words, even though you may have applied the DNS changes that Belkin supplied, you don’t necessarily have to make any further changes to the DNS address unless Belkin recommends it.
Why this matters: Any fix that’s as easy as a reboot should placate customers. But if you’ve decided to look for another router, consider our suggestions for the best 802.11n routers. Alternatively, if you choose to jump to the latest 802.11ac generation, here are the best (and worst) 802.11ac routers, too.