troubleshooting
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The internet does not break politely. It breaks halfway through a bank transfer, or the night before a deadline, or while the football is on and the whole house turns to look at you as if you personally unplugged something. One minute everything works. The next, every page is a spinning circle.
Here is the good news. A total loss of connection is one of the easier faults to pin down, because there are only four things it can be. The router. The line. An outage at your provider. Or one single device that has thrown a strop while everything else is fine.
These five checks run in the order that finds the cause fastest. Work top to bottom and stop the moment it comes back. Most of the time it is a reboot or an outage you were never going to fix.
Before anything clever, do the boring thing properly. Unplug the router at the wall, not just the cable at the back, leave it off for a full 30 seconds, then plug it back in and wait. It can take two to five minutes to fully reconnect, so do not declare it dead at minute one while the lights are still settling.
This works more often than it has any right to. A router is a small computer that has usually been running without a break since the day it arrived, and power-cycling it clears its temporary memory and forces it to renegotiate the connection from scratch. It keeps your settings, so there is no risk.
This is a restart, not a factory reset. A factory reset wipes everything, your wifi name, your password, the lot, and it is a last resort, not a first move. If the reboot brings everything back, you are done. If not, keep going.
Before you blame the broadband, find out whether the broadband is even the problem. Pick up a second device. If your laptop is dead but the phone next to it loads pages perfectly over the same wifi, the fault is the laptop, not the connection. If every device in the house is offline at once, the problem is upstream: the router, the line or the provider.
This one check saves the most wasted time. The tech sites send you straight into network adapter settings on the assumption it is always your device. When the whole house is down, it is not. One device down, jump to Check 5. Everything down, read on.
Routers tell you what is wrong through the lights on the front, if you know which one to read. The labels and colours differ by model, so check the card that came with yours, but the principle holds across all of them.
Look for the broadband or DSL light, the one that means "I have a working line". If it is off, flashing or red, your router cannot find the line, which points at a line fault or an outage rather than your wifi. If that light is steady but you still have no internet, the line is fine and the problem sits further out, usually authentication or the provider's network.
On full fibre you also have a small box on the wall called an ONT. Check its lights too, and check the cable between the ONT and the router is seated at both ends. A kicked cable behind the sofa is not the dignified cause anyone wants, but it is a common one.
Now the bit nobody enjoys, but it is free and occasionally the whole answer. On a part-copper line, the broadband comes in through the master socket, the main phone socket usually nearest the front door, and that is the one that matters. If your router is plugged into a bedroom extension through a long flat cable, try it in the master socket directly. Make sure every plug is fully home. Cables work loose, pets chew, hoovers yank.
On full fibre there is no phone socket in play. It runs on light down a glass fibre, immune to the electrical interference and damp-weather gremlins that haunt the old copper network, so your only cables to check are the fibre lead into the ONT and the lead from the ONT to the router.
This is the check the global how-to articles bury at step six, behind a wall of command-line resets, and it is the most useful thing on this page. Before you spend twenty more minutes fixing a router that was never broken, find out whether your provider has fallen over.
Turn off wifi on your phone so it drops onto mobile data, then check two things: your provider's own service-status page, then whether the problem is you, your area or your provider. If an outage is confirmed, stop. There is nothing at your end to fix, and rebooting the router for the ninth time will not summon an engineer any faster.
Do note the time it went down. If a total loss runs past two full working days and your provider is signed up to the compensation scheme, you are owed money for it. More on that at the end.
If you got here because only one device is offline while the rest of the house is fine, the connection is working and the device is the problem. Three things fix most of these. Restart the device. Forget the wifi network in its settings and rejoin it, typing the password fresh, which clears a stale saved profile that has stopped authenticating. And check you have not left aeroplane mode on or a VPN half-connected, because both produce exactly the "connected, no internet" symptom while looking innocent.
The advanced device surgery the tech sites love, flushing DNS, renewing an IP address, resetting the network stack, sits below all of this. It is never the cause when the house is dark.
You have rebooted, read the lights, checked the cables, ruled out an outage and isolated the device. The house is still dark. Now it goes to your provider. You cannot fix a line fault yourself and you cannot ring Openreach directly: it maintains the network most providers run on but does not manage your account, so only your provider can run a line test and book an engineer.
Call them and skip the apologetic preamble. Say this:
> My broadband has a total loss of service. I have rebooted the router, checked the master socket and confirmed there is no outage in my area. I need you to run a line test and, if needed, book an engineer. Please log the fault from today's date.
That last sentence matters. Logging the date starts the clock on Ofcom's automatic compensation scheme, which since 1 April 2026 pays set amounts without you having to chase. If a total loss of service is not fixed after two full working days from when you reported it, you get £10.34 for each day it stays broken. A missed engineer appointment, or one cancelled with less than 24 hours' notice, is £32.31. A delayed start to a new service is £6.46 a day. It arrives as a bill credit within 30 days.
Two caveats. The scheme is voluntary. Many of the largest providers are in it, including BT, Sky, Virgin Media, TalkTalk, EE, Vodafone, Plusnet, Hyperoptic and Zen, but smaller altnets often are not, so check yours. And there is no payout if the fault was your own kit. The figures come from Ofcom's April 2026 announcement, and how the compensation actually works has the full rules.
If the provider drags it out, you can take the complaint to a free, independent adjudicator after six weeks, or sooner if you get a deadlock letter. That route is ADR, and the decision binds the provider, not you.
One last thing. If the engineer says the line is sound but the fault keeps coming back, that is no longer a fault. It is a reason to look at cheaper, more reliable deals at your address. The wire under the pavement does not care which logo is on your router, and neither should you.
If the connection is up but crawling rather than dead, a speed test tells you what you're dealing with. If it is the wifi specifically, the wifi-not-working walkthrough and the keeps-disconnecting guide take it from there.
