When the WiFi dies, almost everyone does the same two things: restart the router, then phone the ISP and wait. That order wastes an afternoon. Sixty seconds of checking first tells you whether this is an outage you can only wait out, a router problem you can fix yourself, or a line fault worth reporting — and the answer differs quite a bit depending on who you’re with.
The 60-second check
Before anything else, work out how far the failure goes. Each answer eliminates a whole category of cause:
- Is it one device or all of them? One device = that device, not your internet. Reconnect it to the network, or forget the network and rejoin.
- Do you have WiFi but no internet? If devices connect fine but nothing loads, your router is working and the problem is upstream — the line or the ISP.
- What colour are the router lights? A red or off "internet"/"LOS" light means the line isn't reaching you. That's not something a password reset fixes.
- Does a cable work? Plug a laptop directly into the router. If the cable works and WiFi doesn't, it's a WiFi problem, not an internet problem.
WiFi and internet aren't the same thing. WiFi is just the radio link between your device and the router. Your internet is the line coming into the house. "WiFi not working" usually turns out to be one or the other, and they need entirely different fixes — our Wi-Fi or line? tool tells you which in about a minute.
Is it an outage, or just you?
This is the question worth answering before you queue on a support line. If half the suburb is down, there's nothing to fix on your end and no call will speed it up.
Quick ways to tell: check whether your phone still has mobile data (if the whole area is dark, that's a clue), look at your provider's status page or social feed — outages get posted there long before the call centre admits them — and check a neighbour on the same network. Downdetector-style sites are also useful for spotting a spike in reports.
If it is an outage, the useful thing you can do is time it. Leave our uptime monitor running: it timestamps every drop and reconnection, which is exactly the evidence you need if you later claim a service credit or argue that "occasional" downtime is actually daily.
Rain
Rain is fixed wireless, not fibre — your router talks to a mobile tower rather than a cable in the ground. That changes what goes wrong. Signal strength is the usual culprit: the tower is congested, the weather is bad, or something changed near the window where the router lives.
Before assuming a fault, move the router. Height and a clear line toward the tower matter enormously on wireless, and a metre or two can be the difference between unusable and fine. Check the signal bars in Rain's app or router admin page — if they're low, that's your answer. Load shedding also hits wireless harder than fibre, because the tower itself needs power, not just your house.
MWEB
MWEB is an ISP, not a network — it sells over Openserve, Vumatel, Octotel and others. So an MWEB fault is really one of two different things: a problem with MWEB's own service (authentication, routing, capacity), or a problem with the underlying network's line.
The router lights usually separate them. If the line light is healthy but nothing loads, that points at the ISP layer — often a PPPoE session that needs re-authenticating, which a full router power-cycle (off for 30 seconds, not just a reboot) frequently clears. If the line light is red or off, the fault is with the network operator, and MWEB has to log it upstream on your behalf.
Vuma
Same distinction, one step further along: Vumatel owns the fibre, but you don't buy from Vumatel — you buy from an ISP riding their line. So "Vuma is down" is usually reported to the wrong company first.
Check the ONT (the small box where the fibre terminates, separate from your router). A red or flashing LOS light means loss of signal — the fibre itself isn't reaching you, which is a Vumatel-side fault. Log it with your ISP, but say explicitly that the ONT is showing LOS: that gets it escalated to the network operator instead of bouncing around ISP-level troubleshooting. If you're not sure which network you're even on, our guide to working out who your fibre ISP is covers it.
Vodacom & Telkom
Both sell fibre and fixed wireless, and the first thing to establish is which one you have — the fixes have almost nothing in common. If your service came with a SIM, it's wireless: treat it like the Rain advice above, since signal and tower congestion dominate.
If it's fibre, Telkom services usually run over Openserve, so the ONT/LOS check applies exactly as it does for Vuma. Worth knowing that Telkom and Openserve are formally separate businesses, which is why a fault can sit between them — see our guide to Telkom fibre for how that split works in practice.
Still nothing? Log it properly
If you've power-cycled, confirmed it isn't one device, checked the lights and ruled out an area outage, it's a fault — and how you report it changes how fast it moves.
- Lead with the router lights. "My ONT is showing LOS" skips twenty minutes of scripted troubleshooting.
- Say what you already tried — power cycle, cable test, other devices — so they don't walk you through it again.
- Get a reference number and the date. Without one, there's no record you reported it.
- Bring evidence for intermittent faults. Drops that fix themselves before the technician arrives are the hardest to get taken seriously; a timestamped log from the uptime monitor makes them undeniable.
- Escalate to ICASA if the provider's own process fails — they regulate communications complaints in South Africa.
Provider contact details are collected in our fibre provider contact numbers guide, and if it turns out your line is working but simply too slow, why is my internet slow works through that separately.
If this keeps happening and your provider can't fix it, see who else reaches your address — there's often more than one network in a street. Check your address here.