Thunder and lightning very very frightening… ⛈ A tale of woe wrought by nature
A storm woke us up last night and shortly after a very loud thunder clap & flash. I couldn’t go back to sleep so I got up early feeling rather groggy only to discover a rather odd 90% of our devices were offline but the router was on the Internet. Took me a long time to figure out what caused the strange collection of outages. A gigabit switch failed which knocked out WiFi for a lot of devices (because the WiFi extender backhauled over Ethernet through the switch) and also of course all of the devices, like AppleTVs, on that switch were offline.
I managed to get most things back online by plugging a few key Ethernet cables directly into the router in our wiring box. While finishing that up there was a loud flash, click and poof. The power strip in the wiring box shorted out one of the outlets and tripped our whole-house surge protector in the process. I was even more awake, and more irritated. Thankfully the now blackened power strip was the only casualty and not the devices plugged into it - otherwise we’d be without any Internet waiting for a new modem from AT&T.
Even with juggling Ethernet cables I still can’t get part of the house’s wired devices back online and I can find no cause for that. I’ll have to make a run first thing this morning for a new Gigabit switch and surge protector strip. Hopefully that will bring everything back online but if not I’ll have some trouble trying to track down the remaining issue.
Frustrating but nothing serious from a life perspective so grateful for that.