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The original was posted on /r/talesfromtechsupport by /u/Existing_Matter2134 on 2025-09-11 17:04:09+00:00.

Had a ticket from a user who insisted their Wi-Fi kept “disappearing every night at exactly 7 PM.” They weren’t exaggerating either it was like clockwork. I checked the router logs, reviewed configs, even monitored their connection remotely. Everything looked totally fine.

After a few days of chasing ghosts, I finally asked them to walk me through what was happening at 7 PM. That’s when I noticed something strange the Wi-Fi SSID they were connecting to wasn’t even their own. Turns out their neighbor had the same ISP and the same default router name. Every night at 7, the neighbor would unplug their router so they could use the outlet for their microwave. So my user’s “Wi-Fi” would vanish like magic.

The best part? They never realized they’d been freeloading off the neighbor’s network the entire time. Once I set up their own router properly, the 7 PM “mystery outage” was solved for good.