Belkin Router Owners Suffering Massive Outages

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday October 7, 2014 @07:49AM from the who-needs-functioning-equipment-anyway dept.

An anonymous reader writes: ISPs around the country are being kept busy today answering calls from frustrated customers with Belkin routers. Overnight, a firmware issue left many of the Belkin devices with no access to the customer's broadband connection. Initial speculation was that a faulty firmware upgrade caused the devices to lose connectivity, but even users with automatic updates disabled are running into trouble. The problem seems to be that the routers "occasionally ping heartbeat.belkin.com to detect network connectivity," but are suddenly unable to get a response. Belkin has acknowledged the issue and posted a workaround while they work on a fix.

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Bad Belkin by JohnFen · 2014-10-07 07:57 · Score: 5, Insightful

No router should ever be dependent on phoning home to a server in order to work. (No router should be engaging in any communication at all that I haven't told it to!) This is BAD - Broken As Designed. I'm awfully glad that I don't use Belkin stuff.