Owners of Belkin routers around the world are finding themselves unable to get online today. Outages appear to be affecting many different models of Belkin router, and they're hitting customers on any ISP, with Time Warner Cable and Comcast among those affected. ISPs, inundated with support calls by unhappy users, are directing complaints to Belkin's support line, which appears to have gone into meltdown in response.

The reason for the massive outages is currently unknown. Initial speculation was that Belkin pushed a buggy firmware update overnight, but on a reddit thread about the problem, even users who claim to have disabled automatic updates have found their Internet connectivity disrupted.

Others suggest that there is some kind of DNS problem at work. Although the routers are correctly picking up their DNS settings from DHCP, they're apparently unable to resolve domain names correctly. Connecting to the Internet using IP addresses alone does, in fact, appear to work, but with most of us dependent on DNS, this is of little value.

Some reddit users appear to have found a partial resolution for the problem by telling the machines on their network to use public DNS servers, such as Google's public DNS (with addresses 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4). This bypasses the router's broken name resolution and enables normal Internet access.

We've reached out to Belkin for comment but received nothing at the time of writing. The company does appear to have published a help page acknowledging the problem and advising the same static DNS workaround that reddit users have already discovered.

Update: Belkin has given us the following statement:

Starting approximately midnight on October 7, Belkin began experiencing an issue with a service configured in certain Belkin router models that causes a failure when it checks for general network connectivity by pinging a site hosted by Belkin. We know this issue has affected select older Wireless-N Belkin router models including F9K1102, F9K1105, F9K1113 and F9K1116. We are continuing to investigate other possible routers that may have been affected. We are working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible. Until there is a fix in place, we have identified a workaround for customers that are using the F9K1102 and F9K1105 routers to regain internet connectivity. That work-around as well as ongoing updates can be found at our outage status page for more information: www.belkin.com/outage

Update 2: Belkin has sent a second statement: