Yesterday morning, Belkin routers prevented users from accessing the Internet. In a statement provided to TechCrunch Belkin identified and outlined steps it will take to prevent it from happening again:
“One of our cloud services associated with maintaining router operations was negatively impacted by a change made in our data center that caused a false denial of service. Normal operations were restored by 3PM PST, however, some users might still be required to reset their router and/or cable modem to regain connectivity. Moving forward, we will continue to monitor, improve and validate the system to ensure our routers continue to work properly in the event connectivity to our cloud environment is not available.”
It took Belkin some 15 hours to fix the issue, which caused wide-eyed speculation and conspiracy theories.
Even with this explanation, it’s a scary thought that a local networking device can be disabled or even controlled from a remote server. Apparently, per the official statement, the outage was not caused by Belkin uploading buggy firmware, but rather one of Belkin’s remote operations.