8 ways to bring up Wi-Fi

Has your company network ever gone down? That's mostly a rhetorical question — it's happened to pretty much everyone.

Has your company network ever gone down? That's mostly a rhetorical question — it's happened to pretty much everyone. It's usually a few-minute issue, but if you don't know what to do, and you either don't have an IT specialist or they're not available, it can stretch into hours and cost you serious money. So in this article I'll give you a few tips on what to do and how to fix the problem as quickly as possible.

Where do I start?

First, find out who's affected by the problem. If it's only one person, there's probably no point restarting the entire network.

It affects more than one person — what now?

If your company is split into segments and one of them is down, it's important to check and fix the closest device you can no longer reach. In practice that means:

1.      Use ping or tracert to see which devices you can still reach, and focus on the next one out.

2.      Restart the device.

3.      Check error messages (if there are any).

4.      Check the physical cable connections.

5.      Check the device's software configuration.

6.      Try swapping the device for a known-working one.

7.      Make sure no device is infected with malware.

8.      Try updating the software.

9.      Pray.

If everything's down, try restarting whatever you can — and if that doesn't help, follow the same steps.