Hey Maya!

Thanks for getting in touch. I would like to offer some validation here - this is WEIRD. I have done a lot of networking over the years and this one is pretty interesting to me - that is to say, you are not missing anything!

So I took a look through everything, and I do see quite a few occurrences within your .pp2 file of a service interruption. However - I don't believe it's to your ISP's fault. At least not the specific pattern of red and high latency that I've included. I'm not sure about everything else yet.

If you take a look at the attached (hopefully) pictures, I grabbed some screenshots that stuck out to me and could give us a breadcrumb to follow. There seemed to be only one "chunk" of time where this issue happened, but it happened quite a few times. The pattern that you see in the attached screenshots looks kind of like stairs, right? And they all look like the exact same pattern. This pattern is originating from "inside the house" - hop 1 is your router, and the problems are showing up from the get-go. This could also explain why the ISP didn't see an interruption - because if the issue is localized to within your four walls, but the ISP is still doing fine, it most likely won't show them any issues.

Usually 1 of 3 things is happening when we see this type of pattern:

1. Bandwidth is saturated, which is the most likely in my opinion (and is the most common I've seen). This would mean that your network has too much traffic for your router to handle. Now, you might be saying "Hey! But I wasn't even downloading anything!" - and that's valid. However, I have seen several occurrences where these outages happen every night at the same time, and patterns look like bandwidth saturation - and it's because stuff is downloading updates! A lot of devices want to download updates at the same time every day, and a lot of those updates are pretty big. It could even be the router itself updating (which seems like a likely one to me).

2. The router has bad hardware. I see this happen a lot, but it's not really all that common in this specific pattern, at those specific times. It's usually more sporadic - we could see a *similar* pattern, and we would see the "no internet" symbol on your computer - but I don't know if I would place my bets on this. Still a possibility.

3. The router could have some form of rate-limiting enabled. Check your router and see if you can find anything that leads you to believe it's throttling anything.

My first recommendation would be to check the logs on the router. Since it seems that we caught an instance of the router misbehaving, it seems like we can probably start with your router (this is also the easiest place to start, and PingPlotter gave me a reason to scrutinize it for a bit). Check the logs (and if you're having a hard time finding them, send me a picture of your router or a model number or something and I can probably steer you to the right spot). I'd be curious to see if there's anything interesting in the logs.

My second recommendation is to run Windows Network Diagnostics on your computer. It should be built-in (and it might be called network troubleshooting) but it could also help you explain why you have no connectivity but yet PingPlotter is still going through. For example, there could be a DNS problem, and Windows might be able to catch something like that. Regardless, if PingPlotter data is getting through just fine, that means there's definitely some form of connection. Windows Network Diagnostics could potentially help you figure out why exactly ICMP (our) packets are going through, but nothing else is. You could also run Wireshark while there's an outage and while you're trying to surf the web and send me the results (let me know if you want to do that and I can help you get set up - this is just getting a little long so I'm omitting that for simplicity).

Third recommendation, if none of that helped, is to take this to your ISP and show them that the route changed, and right when that happened, you lost service. The screenshots you sent me were very helpful. I don't have insight into why there's a different route there because I'm not an ISP. However, your ISP should be able to look into this routing and figure out if there's any trend. With this, we have to remember that the IP and the route in your trace to *Google* changed while there was an outage - and that doesn't dictate what all the other traffic is doing, but could be a breadcrumb you send to your ISP. It also may be helpful to run a few of these traces side-by-side - for example, you could trace to Google, Netflix, and pingplotter.com for example. The more diverse data you can give your ISP, the better - and try to see if you can notice any patterns like that route change. The issue could potentially *not* be with the router, despite what we saw in those screenshots (since you've had outages when PingPlotter said it was A-OK). Never say never.

My fourth and last recommendation is, well, to try a new router. I understand we all don't have money to burn on routers (I sure don't), and that's usually the first thing people have you do, but it definitely would be a great spot to start in nailing down what this issue is just based on the fact that I saw some issues to begin with, and I ran with that.

I hope this helps you - and let me know if you have any questions!