It’s safe to say that most businesses today rely on the Internet, as do most of the humans who work at them. Therefore, when the cable suddenly goes out and their connection is lost, many employees may find themselves struggling with a downtime incident. There can be many causes to a lost Internet connection, with just as many ways to identify and resolve it.

First of all, make sure that all of your cables are securely plugged in. All the troubleshooting in the world won’t solve a problem if the cause is a loose router connection. Once you’ve ensured that your connection problems aren’t the result of an equipment issue, you should try some other simple tests to identify your problems.

The first test to run is to send a ping command to a website. Access the Command Prompt window from your Start menu and type ping google.com. Your computer will then send packets to Google. If your Command Prompt window indicates a loss of packets, you could have a network problem. Whether the problem is with your network, the website itself (which isn’t very likely if multiple websites lose packets when pinged), or with your Internet Service Provider is yet to be determined.

If your ping works, but you’re still experiencing connection issues, the website itself could be having some issues. If you can access them, Down Detector and Down For Everyone Or Just For Me could shine some light on the nature of your issue.

If a lot of websites are displaying issues, the problem could be on your end. Your modem and router have lights that will display their status. If there’s an issue, a simple restart by unplugging them and plugging them back in could solve it. Otherwise, you may need to update these components.

If these connection problems are contained to a single computer or device, the issue might be in its software. This issue could be some malware, easily identified through a simple malware scan.

Finally, your ISP could be experiencing issues with its DNS. If you can’t access a website through its IP address, your ISP is experiencing DNS issues.

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