Belkin says router outages should be resolved

Belkin said Tuesday afternoon it had fixed an issue that caused some of its Wi-Fi routers to disconnect from the Internet.

Some of the older routers experienced problems around midnight on Tuesday when pinging a Belkin-hosted service to check for general network connectivity, the company wrote on its forum.

Several of the company's wireless LAN routers were affected, including the F9K1102, F9K1105, F9K1113, F9K1102, F9K1105 and F9K1116 models. It wasn't immediately clear what caused the problem.

Belkin apologized to customers, writing that "we are taking a number of actions to eliminate this sort of incident from reoccurring."

Johannes Ullrich, the dean of research at the SANS Technology Institute, wrote that the routers in question occasionally ping "heartbeat.belkin.com" to detect connectivity, but that host was not reachable for some users.

The connectivity issue apparently affected the routers' ability to use DNS (Domain Name System) services, which resolve a domain name into an IP address that can be called into a browser.

As a workaround, Belkin recommended that users change the DNS settings of their routers to "8.8.8.8" and to "8.8.4.4," which are the IP addresses for Google's Public DNS service.

Routers that are still not working should be unplugged and then plugged back in after one minute, Belkin advised. The router should reconnect in five minutes, it said.

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