It happens right when the meeting starts. Or when you’re about to win that 1v1 in Warzone. Everything freezes. The little yellow icon appears on your taskbar, or your phone switches to 5G, and you’re left staring at a spinning wheel of death. Honestly, having your internet keeps cutting out is more frustrating than having no internet at all because it gives you just enough hope to stay online before snatching it away. It’s the digital equivalent of a leaky faucet, but instead of water, you’re losing productivity and sanity.
Most people assume it’s the ISP. They call Comcast or AT&T, wait on hold for forty minutes, and get told to "unplug the router." Sometimes that works. Usually, it doesn't. The reality is that intermittent connectivity is rarely a single, giant problem. It’s usually a symphony of small failures—interference from your neighbor's new baby monitor, a dying coaxial cable behind your drywall, or a router that simply can’t handle the 25 smart devices you’ve hooked up to it since 2022.
The Infrastructure Problem: It Might Not Be Your Router
Before you buy a $400 mesh system, look at the physical line. If your internet keeps cutting out during rainstorms or high winds, the issue is almost certainly outside. Copper wiring—the stuff used for DSL and Cable internet—degrades. It’s science. Oxidation happens. If the "drop" (the cable running from the pole to your house) has a tiny nick in it, moisture gets in. This changes the electrical resistance of the wire. Your modem sees this as "noise" and drops the connection to protect the data integrity.
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You can check this yourself by looking at your modem’s internal logs. Most people don’t know they can do this. You just type 192.168.100.1 or 192.168.1.1 into your browser. Look for the "Upstream Bonded Channels" and "Downstream Bonded Channels." If the "Correctables" and "Uncorrectables" numbers are in the millions, your physical line is junk. You have a hardware "bleed" that no amount of restarting will fix.
The Splitter Scourge
Check behind your TV. Is there a cheap, gold-colored $2 splitter from 1998 connecting your modem and your cable box? Throw it away. Every time you split a coaxial signal, you lose about 3.5dB of signal strength. If your signal is already marginal, that splitter is the reason your internet keeps cutting out. Direct lines are always better. If you must use a splitter, get a MoCA-rated one that supports up to 1675MHz. Your old one probably caps out at 900MHz, which literally chokes modern high-speed data.
Why Wi-Fi is Usually the Villain
Wi-Fi is a miracle, but it’s also a chaotic mess. It’s just radio waves. If you live in an apartment complex, your internet keeps cutting out because you are fighting a war for "airtime" with thirty other people.
The 2.4GHz band is a disaster zone. It only has three non-overlapping channels: 1, 6, and 11. Your microwave, your Bluetooth headphones, and your neighbor's ancient cordless phone all live here. When the microwave starts, the "noise floor" rises, and your Wi-Fi signal gets drowned out. Switch to the 5GHz or 6GHz (Wi-Fi 6E/7) bands whenever possible. They have more "lanes" for data to travel.
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DFS Channels: The Hidden Disconnector
Here is a nuance most "tech support" scripts miss: DFS (Dynamic Frequency Selection) channels. If you’ve set your router to "Auto" channel selection, it might hop onto a DFS channel. These are shared with weather radar and military applications. By law, if your router detects a radar pulse, it must instantly vacate that channel. This causes a 10 to 60-second drop while the router finds a new "home." If you live near an airport or a naval base and your internet keeps cutting out at random intervals, go into your settings and manually lock your 5GHz channel to something lower, like channel 36 or 48.
The "Bufferbloat" Nightmare
Sometimes the internet isn't actually "cutting out" in a technical sense. Instead, it’s choking. This is called Bufferbloat. It’s a software issue within routers where they try to be "too helpful" by queuing up data packets instead of dropping them.
Imagine a highway. If there’s too much traffic, a good router acts like a traffic cop, letting some cars go and telling others to wait. A bad router (or one with poor firmware) lets everyone onto the ramp until the whole highway is a parking lot. Your ping spikes to 1,000ms, your Zoom call freezes, and it feels like the internet died.
You can test this at sites like Waveform’s Bufferbloat Test. If you get a "C" or a "D," your router is the problem. You need a router with SQM (Smart Queue Management). Brands like Eero have this built-in (often called "Optimize for Conferencing and Gaming"), and it makes a world of difference for households where one person is downloading a game while another is on a video call.
Hardware Fatigue and Overheating
Electronics don't last forever. Routers are basically small computers with CPUs and RAM. They get hot. If your router is stuffed inside a wooden cabinet or buried under a pile of mail, it’s going to thermal throttle. When the chip gets too hot, it resets itself to prevent permanent damage. That’s why a reboot helps—it gives the hardware a few minutes to cool down before it starts the slow climb back to 90 degrees Celsius.
Firmware: The Invisible Fix
Security vulnerabilities and bugs are found every day. If your internet keeps cutting out, check for a firmware update. Manufacturers release patches that improve "handshaking" protocols with new devices (like that new iPhone or Samsung you just bought). If your router is five years old and hasn't had an update in three, it’s basically a doorstop. You’re asking a device designed for the tech of 2019 to handle the data demands of 2026. It's not going to happen.
DNS: The Phonebook of the Web
Sometimes your connection is fine, but your "navigation" is broken. DNS (Domain Name System) translates "https://www.google.com/search?q=google.com" into an IP address. Most ISPs use their own DNS servers, and frankly, they are usually slow and prone to crashing. When the ISP's DNS server hangs, your browser says "Server Not Found," and you think the internet keeps cutting out.
Switching to a third-party DNS like Cloudflare (1.1.1.1) or Google (8.8.8.8) is a five-minute fix that can stop these "soft" disconnects. You can do this at the device level or, ideally, right at the router level so every phone and laptop in the house benefits.
What to Do Next: A Practical Checklist
Stop guessing and start isolating. If you want to stop the cycle of your internet keeps cutting out, follow this specific order of operations:
- The Wired Test: Plug a laptop directly into your modem via Ethernet. Bypass the router entirely. If the internet still cuts out while you're hardwired to the source, the problem is 100% your ISP or the modem itself. Stop troubleshooting your Wi-Fi; you're wasting time.
- Check the SNR (Signal-to-Noise Ratio): Log into your modem (192.168.100.1). You want your Downstream SNR to be above 33dB. Anything lower means there is "electrical noise" on your line. Call your ISP and tell the technician specifically that your "SNR is fluctuating below 30dB." They will take you much more seriously than if you just say "it's slow."
- Audit Your Devices: Check if the drops happen only when a specific device joins the network. A faulty Wi-Fi card on an old printer can actually "poison" the entire network by forcing the router to use older, slower protocols (like 802.11b), causing everyone else to lag or drop.
- Replace the Power Brick: This is a pro-level tip. Sometimes the router is fine, but the cheap AC power adapter is dying and not providing consistent voltage. If the lights on your router flicker or dim when the internet drops, buy a universal 12V adapter (matching your router's specs) and swap it. It costs $10 and fixes more "intermittent" issues than you’d believe.
- Upgrade to Wi-Fi 6 or 7: If you have more than 15 connected devices, older Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) routers simply cannot keep up with the "talk-time" required. Modern standards use OFDMA, which allows the router to talk to multiple devices simultaneously instead of one by one.
If you’ve done the wired test and it still fails, the ball is in the ISP's court. Demand they check the "tap" at the street and the "ground block" at your house. Grounding issues are a frequent culprit for intermittent drops, especially in older neighborhoods. Static builds up on the line and has nowhere to go, so it eventually "burps" and resets the modem's connection to the headend. Fix the ground, fix the internet.
The path to stable connectivity isn't usually a single "magic button." It’s about removing the bottlenecks. Start with the physical wires, move to the router settings, and finally address the Wi-Fi environment. If your internet keeps cutting out, there is always a logical, physical reason for it. You just have to be methodical enough to find it.