When the client calls to say the internet is down…

“The internet isn’t working” can mean a whole lot of things, so most of the time, after taking on an incident like this, technicians immediately start checking the client’s entire infrastructure. Our Helpdesk colleagues take the call, and those who work remotely access the equipment on site to make an initial assessment of the fault. You’ll find more about this process in the article on what happens after you request support from an outsourced IT department.

Step one: understanding the problem correctly

The first step is understanding the problem correctly. For a technician, the internet means the link between the company’s network and the rest of the world. For users, though, “the internet isn’t working” can be anything: an email that won’t send, a printer that doesn’t respond, a site that loads slowly, a video meeting that keeps dropping, or the accounting app on the server.

Plus, it’s sometimes genuinely hard to tell, without technical skills and knowledge of the infrastructure, whether the internet isn’t working at all or whether only one or more segments of the local network are down.

And after all, it’s not the accountant’s job to understand how the internet works; that’s why they have a contract with an IT outsourcing company, right?

Below, I’ll briefly go through the stages of solving a problem like this.

How the problem is diagnosed

The diagnostic process begins. The monitoring platform is checked, and the technician tries to access the network equipment. These checks reveal whether the problem is a general one, with the internet, in which case the incident can be escalated to the internet provider, or one with the internal network.

If the router isn’t reachable, the technician checks its physical condition and whether it has power. The router is restarted, and the technician watches for any warning lights on the device. If nothing changes after the restart, an incident is opened with the internet provider.

If the router is reachable, the infrastructure check continues. The servers on site are accessed, along with the network equipment. At this step, the technician calls the client, says the internet is working at the location, and asks for more information so the problem can be better isolated.

The client is guided through restarting the network equipment, both the switches on site and the wireless equipment.

In most situations, problems can be fixed over the phone or remotely. Working this way saves a lot of time, and the client can get back to work relatively quickly.

When is an on-site visit needed?

If the fault is physical, an on-site visit has to be scheduled to check the whole infrastructure. The on-site technicians consult with the colleagues who worked remotely and read the notes in the ticket, to understand both the problem and what has already been checked from the office. You can read about their work in the article a day in the life of an on-site technician.

Even though many employees now work in a hybrid setup, part of the time from home, the office infrastructure still needs to run at its best.

What can an employee check before calling support?

A few one-minute checks shorten the diagnosis a lot:

• Does the problem affect all your colleagues, or just one computer? If it’s just one, restarting the computer often solves the problem.
• Does it work on cable but not on Wi-Fi, or the other way around? This shows whether it’s the wireless network or the connection itself.
• Is no site working, or just one? If only one site or app won’t open, the problem may be with that service, not in your office.
• What error message appears? A screenshot of the exact message helps the technician more than any description.

How do you avoid downtime when the internet goes down?

You can’t stop your internet provider from having an outage, but you can make sure it doesn’t stop your company:

• A second internet connection, from another provider or over 4G/5G, with automatic failover when the main link goes down. With email, documents and apps in the cloud, the connection has become as important as electricity.
• An uninterruptible power supply (UPS) for the router, switches and server, so a short power outage doesn’t take the network down.
• Monitoring of network equipment, which sends an alert when the link goes down, often before anyone calls.
• Network documentation: the internet provider, the contract number, where the router sits and who has the passwords. With it, an incident can be opened in a few minutes.

How quickly does the support team step in?

At RezolvIT, we answer the phone within 15 minutes at most, we step in remotely within one hour at most, through the MspCoreX app, and we reach your site in 2 – 4 hours, depending on your plan. We work on site in Bucharest and across the rest of Romania. Details about IT maintenance and our IT plans.

RezolvIT is a managed IT services company in Bucharest, used to working with businesses of all sizes, from companies with fewer than 10 employees to subsidiaries of multinationals. Because it looks after a very wide range of infrastructures, it can propose the right solutions for each one. We start with a free IT audit.