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[Spyxos]

Let me start.
I had no internet for 5 weeks last year, thanks to Vodafone. Every week i was told that it will be 100% back in the next week. During the first week, a technician also came by. Unfortunately, he did not know what to do. A technician should come by who is more experienced. Only that he never arrived. No Internet no Tv, at some point you get Monopoly and other puzzle games out so that the time passes somehow. I cancelled the contract after 3-4 weeks.

Sent the router back, then the game started as i should pay for the router because it supposedly never arrived. I did not want to pay extra for this dirty router at all. They probably did not want to pay any compensation. It took a good 5 emails and 2 letters before the router costs were reimbursed. Still pissed at this company to this day.

 

[BossLackey]

That sounds like a nightmare.

Around 2005 or so when everyone had broadband, my parents decided to just...not have internet anymore for some reason. So for like 6 months we didn't have it and I don't remember any reason behind it. I'll have to ask them.

It's one thing to get internet late, it's another thing entirely to have broadband for years and then just not having it...

 

[Maiden Voyage]

One time I went a few minutes without checking my socials. Worst experience of my life.

 

[jufonuk]

One time I went a few minutes without checking my socials. Worst experience of my life.

 

[Kilau]

This one time while playing Portal 2 on PS3, the PSN connection was lost and didn't come back for weeks.

 

[BadBurger]

Had a project go-live at 4AM on a Sunday morning. I am basically driving everything on the infra side. I wake up, brew my morning coffee, and sit down at about 3:15 AM in my home office only to discover the internet isn't working. Use my phone to confirm with Cox they're doing some random unannounced maintenance and ALL of their services are going to be down for like 12 hours. Text the project manager that I have issues and who to page in case I am not there by go-live.

Hurriedly get dressed and rush into the real office. Luckily at the time I lived down the street in downtown. Yank on the door - fuck, forgot my badge. Having been working from home for many months by that point it hadn't even occurred to me.

Race back home, grab badge, return to work, and get my laptop up and running connected to a monitor array in our COE. Got all of my tools and scripts prepared and jumped on the Teams meeting at literally 3:55.

The first thing I hear when I get on: "Bad, you're on? Great. We're postponing the go-live until this afternoon, bla bla bla". I sent out relevant emails to my team and the person who's problem it would be later and took myself to IHOP for breakfast.

 

[Spaceman292]

I went on vacation for two weeks to a secluded house in the mountains with no internet and I suddenly became really happy. Thank god that's over.

 

[Divus]

I’ve been online since 1993. I once used 40 hours of internet on our 10 hours a month plan and was billed a couple hundred dollars. Lost internet for a good 6 months.

Worse general experience was in 2016 Mediacom upgraded something on there end. This allowed me to connect to the internet but no actual data was being transmitted. Took two weeks of me and other people in my area begging them to look into it before they realized the new equipment was faulty. Took another week to replace it. It was daily phone calls and emails complaining and on there forum they had there was a dozen or more other people all saying the same thing from the same small town. Could not convince them there was a problem.

My aunt had her Frontier DSL go out in a fairly rural area for 4 months. Said due to the weather they couldn’t service anything. It was bad but damn.

 

[Happosai]

Had an internet line for our fiber optic snap last August. Like 30 phone calls with on site techs dispatched who never showed, 3 visits to their principal office with managers. Finally took a neighborhood letter to get them to put a new pole up and fix the line. This last 2-weeks but certainly felt longer.

In the 2000's had a weird ISP (because it was afforable) which had a random service outage that lasted 3-weeks. They had one phone line which was local Nebraska (we were in Illinois) and wouldn't do much other than repeat the: we're running tests and should have it fixed soon...

We cancelled shortly after when they went down again after only a few weeks back in service.

 

[Puscifer]

It took so long to fix that me and the cable guy both fell asleep on the floor of my new apartment like 10 years ago

 

[Happosai]

I’ve been online since 1993. I once used 40 hours of internet on our 10 hours a month plan and was billed a couple hundred dollars. Lost internet for a good 6 months.

Worse general experience was in 2016 Mediacom upgraded something on there end. This allowed me to connect to the internet but no actual data was being transmitted. Took two weeks of me and other people in my area begging them to look into it before they realized the new equipment was faulty. Took another week to replace it. It was daily phone calls and emails complaining and on there forum they had there was a dozen or more other people all saying the same thing from the same small town. Could not convince them there was a problem.

My aunt had her Frontier DSL go out in a fairly rural area for 4 months. Said due to the weather they couldn’t service anything. It was bad but damn.

I wasn't going to use their name because I thought they were long gone. Mediacom was the one I was referring to as well. Small town too but they were 'running diagnostic checks' and that was provided you got an email from them. Seemed like the four days we couldn't even get an answer.

 

[West Texas CEO]

I once had an internet outage and had to go outside. The worst experience of my life

 

[Northeastmonk]

What sucks is working on-call during a big storm and all these outage alerts start coming in. I have to get on the phone with multiple ISPs (Mediacom, Lumen, Cox, and etc) just get an ETA on when they’ll be back up. Many companies will have a failover ISP for some redundancy. At home, it rarely happens.

 

[Ozzy Onya A2Z]

It took so long to fix that me and the cable guy both fell asleep on the floor of my new apartment like 10 years ago

 

[Spaceman292]

It took so long to fix that me and the cable guy both fell asleep on the floor of my new apartment like 10 years ago

Did you cuddle?

 

[KrakenIPA]

Let me start.
I had no internet for 5 weeks last year, thanks to Vodafone. Every week i was told that it will be 100% back in the next week. During the first week, a technician also came by. Unfortunately, he did not know what to do. A technician should come by who is more experienced. Only that he never arrived. No Internet no Tv, at some point you get Monopoly and other puzzle games out so that the time passes somehow. I cancelled the contract after 3-4 weeks.

Sent the router back, then the game started as i should pay for the router because it supposedly never arrived. I did not want to pay extra for this dirty router at all. They probably did not want to pay any compensation. It took a good 5 emails and 2 letters before the router costs were reimbursed. Still pissed at this company to this day.

That sounds real harsh. I've been online since 1995 and I have a few stories I might be able to dig up (they are mostly about AOL 4.5). I was thinking of making a 'Your best internet connection stories' thread, but im gonna wait a bit.

On topic: the unstoppable and inequitable sound of an old modem screeching when you're trying to do nighttime internet stuff, and then it dies

 

[V1LÆM]

My internet was out for about a week but it wasn't bad. I have my phone but couldn't watch anything on my TV or play online on my PC.

I hate how much we've come to rely on the internet. The internet is cool and made a lot of things better but we feel the need to be connected all the time. I grew up without internet so it's not difficult for me to go out a walk, read a book, travel somewhere, or just sit with my own thoughts. A lot of people these days can't cope with no internet and it's a shame.

 

[01011001]

Let me start.
I had no internet for 5 weeks last year, thanks to Vodafone. Every week i was told that it will be 100% back in the next week. During the first week, a technician also came by. Unfortunately, he did not know what to do. A technician should come by who is more experienced. Only that he never arrived. No Internet no Tv, at some point you get Monopoly and other puzzle games out so that the time passes somehow. I cancelled the contract after 3-4 weeks.

Sent the router back, then the game started as i should pay for the router because it supposedly never arrived. I did not want to pay extra for this dirty router at all. They probably did not want to pay any compensation. It took a good 5 emails and 2 letters before the router costs were reimbursed. Still pissed at this company to this day.

I had about a week of no Internet, also Vodafone... but to be fair the original cause wasn't their fault. some idiot at a construction site cut the fucking cable

the annoying part was how long it took Vodafone to fix the damn thing. and it turned out only 2 connections were cut by that accident, and my ass had one of those oh boy did I feel lucky hearing that

 

[Lasha]

I went on vacation for two weeks to a secluded house in the mountains with no internet and I suddenly became really happy. Thank god that's over.

I love those types of vacations. Heaven for me is a bungalow on the Malaysian coast where I need to walk a km to get data. Fishings, grilling in the sand, campfires, and swimming without any outside interference. I'm dead to the world once I hit my number.

 

[Spaceman292]

I love those types of vacations. Heaven for me is a bungalow on the Malaysian coast where I need to walk a km to get data. Fishings, grilling in the sand, campfires, and swimming without any outside interference. I'm dead to the world once I hit my number.

I read a paper book too it was fabulous

 

[Pegasus Actual]

When I went off to college I thought man this is gonna be awesome they'll have amazing Internet, I won't have to do dial-up anymore it's going to be just the best. Then I realized their firewall completely blocked ICQ and it would be months before I went home and could let my gaming friends know I was alive let alone actually play something online with them.

 

[THE DUCK]

One time the internet went down for a whole day.....and we had to......gasp........go outside!

This thread makes me think about everyone who flips out if xbox live or ps network is down you would think the sky is falling.
Instead of just doing something else people are at the gates with pitchforks and shouting from the rooftops how much better physical games are... ...

 

[Giallo Corsa]

I'm on a 1Gbps FWA connection with Fastweb (Italy) and let me tell you, every friggin' day is an adventure...

In retrospect, I should have listened to all the dissatisfied customers /bad opinions about this ISP but they were the only ones that offered this type of connection/speed around my part of the world - and at such a low price.

Non existent customer support which is available only via web from 09:00 AM to 18:00 PM, connection drops, connection speed problems every other day, incompetent technicians etc etc.

Never again

 

[GymWolf]

I'm on a 1Gbps FWA connection with Fastweb (Italy) and let me tell you, every friggin' day is an adventure...

In retrospect, I should have listened to all the dissatisfied customers /bad opinions about this ISP but they were the only ones that offered this type of connection/speed around my part of the world - and at such a low price.

Non existent customer support which is available only via web from 09:00 AM to 18:00 PM, connection drops, connection speed problems every other day, incompetent technicians etc etc.

Never again

Really? Fastweb is super stable here in sicily, telecom and especially vodafone are worse.

 

[ScHlAuChi]

It was July 4th and there was this giant Alien Space Ship floating above New York.
I was going to upload a Mac virus to make it self destruct, but the damn internet was down, so the aliens won :<

 

[BlackTron]

I’ve been online since 1993. I once used 40 hours of internet on our 10 hours a month plan and was billed a couple hundred dollars. Lost internet for a good 6 months.

Not really an outage story, but reminds me of way back I got in trouble for downloading too much data at my moms/stepdads house on his laptop. Nintendo had just released footage of the new Zelda and I downloaded the video on dial-up in a stressed panic. I ended up being shocked and appalled that Link looked like a powerpuff girl. The next time I came over, they showed me the bill and I had to figure out a way to pay for it.

 

[Giallo Corsa]

Really? Fastweb is super stable here in sicily, telecom and especially vodafone are worse.

Brother, it's one of the worst ISP companies i've ever had the misfortune of using - and i've been using the internet since the 56K modem days
It's one of the most - if not the most - unstable connections i've ever had, one day i'm downloading at 90-100MB/s , the next day i can't even surf due to 150-200Kbps speeds, it's just...fucking awful - and don't get me started on their inexistent customer support and "technicians"...
Get this, TWICE now i had the problem of REALLY terrible speeds and upon contacting them 3-4 times, they finally decided to send a technician to my home to...swap the router again, motherfuckers, IT'S NOT the friggin' router that's at fault here but your friggin' 5G tower antenna - something which the technician also acknowledged but couldn't do anything about it, "they told me to change the router again" he said.

Then again, i'm only paying 22€ a month (internet only) and all the other options (Vodafone etc) offered me a fibre connection up to 30Mbps for 35-40 euro a month.

It is what it is, gonna go with a different ISP though when i move to the Northern part of pasta country, f' dis sheeiiit !

 

[drganon]

It once took about a week for spectrum, then time warner, to fix our internet when the cheap underground cable they used broke.

 

[Puscifer]

Did you cuddle?

Nah, I was moving in and didn't have any furniture and we're both sitting on the floor while he's on the phone with the NOC at Comcast, he was on hold waiting for so long that while we're on the opposite sides of the room end up power napping and we woke up when the person on speaker phone said "Alright looks he's ready to go!" And it spooked the shit out of us

 

[GymWolf]

Brother, it's one of the worst ISP companies i've ever had the misfortune of using - and i've been using the internet since the 56K modem days
It's one of the most - if not the most - unstable connections i've ever had, one day i'm downloading at 90-100MB/s , the next day i can't even surf due to 150-200Kbps speeds, it's just...fucking awful - and don't get me started on their inexistent customer support and "technicians"...
Get this, TWICE now i had the problem of REALLY terrible speeds and upon contacting them 3-4 times, they finally decided to send a technician to my home to...swap the router again, motherfuckers, IT'S NOT the friggin' router that's at fault here but your friggin' 5G tower antenna - something which the technician also acknowledged but couldn't do anything about it, "they told me to change the router again" he said.

Then again, i'm only paying 22€ a month (internet only) and all the other options (Vodafone etc) offered me a fibre connection up to 30Mbps for 35-40 euro a month.

It is what it is, gonna go with a different ISP though when i move to the Northern part of pasta country, f' dis sheeiiit !

I had to switch from telecom because they were as terrible as you are describing fastweb.

I have a contract with them since forever and i barely remember a full day without internet connection.

 

[Nitty_Grimes]

Sometimes the modem reboots and I'm without internet for something like 4 minutes.

I mean I can have a wank but what to do in the other 3 minutes while I'm waiting?