Belkin routers lose internet connection massively due to firmware bug

Routers of the company Belkin went offline en masse in the course of Tuesday due to a supposed error in the firmware. Belkin has said that manually entering DNS servers can restore the Internet connection, but the exact cause is not yet clear.

It rained complaints from owners of a Belkin router, including via Twitter, on Tuesday. The Belkin helpdesk in the US was overloaded by the large number of outage reports. Several router models no longer had a working internet connection, but it is still unclear how many users were affected.

Belkin initially came up with a workaround. To do this, the user must manually enter a static dns address, such as Google’s dns servers 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4. Some time later, Belkin announced that the issues had been resolved without providing further details. Routers that still have connection problems should work again after a reboot.

The company says it is still looking for the exact cause of the problems. Reddit, among others, is speculating about a bug in a recent firmware update. For example, the affected routers would try unsuccessfully to contact the address heartbeat.belkin.com, after which the dns daemons in the router firmware might crash or no longer function correctly.