this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2026
29 points (96.8% liked)
Technology
89311 readers
3212 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Reminds me of when I did DSL customer service. Once every few months we'd get a customer (never the same one twice) calling up saying that their connection was terrible, and when we checked the logs, their connection would dropping at incredibly regular intervals aligned well with human units of time. On the hour (or a few minutes past) every hour, for example, or every 10 minutes.
We figured, and told them, that it had to be something on a timer causing an EMP or other interference at their end because there ought to be nothing outside their premises acting with such specific regularity.
The caller usually went away and we'd see the connection stabilise not long after, leaving us none the wiser, but hey, fixed!
Like the Parkes observatory mystery signals
I don't think we got one that tracked back to lunchtime specifically, and those tend to be slightly less well aligned or frequent anyway, but the one that was being caused by a freight elevator's motor was a devil to track down before we knew what it was.
And we may not have found it if the engineer had used the stairs to come back from the basement where the router was. Lazy engineer plus angry motor = DSL died when engineer still present. "It died again! What did you do?" "What did I what now?"