This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/talesfromtechsupport by /u/wanderdive on 2025-09-14 06:28:22+00:00.

Yesterday I read the post about the 7:00 PM WiFi disappearance and it reminded me of this one. It didn’t technically happen to me in person, but it was my team and my boss at the time.

This was maybe some 20 years ago, I was working IT support for an oilfield service company, and was taking care of a large operational site along with 5 remote ones.

One of the remote sites was a training center, and they started to have a weird issue. Exactly at 7:00 PM like clockwork part of the building loses connectivity. We tried looking for any issues remotely but couldn’t find anything wrong, only that the distribution switch for that part of the building in unreachable.

So finally my boss visits the location and at 7:00 PM, poof! He does the troubleshooting and the both the core switch and the distribution switch are up, but no communication between them. Other distribution switches are connected with no issues.

The next day he started to observe anything and everything that happens on the site at 7:00 PM. One of the things he noticed was that this was when it starts to get dark, and the security person starts making his rounds, and turning on all the huge stadium-like lights for the site. And this is the exact moment the connectivity is disrupted.

Turns out they just installed new lights, and the lazy money-saving contractor extended the high power cable through the network ducts that housed the Ethernet cables (later upgraded to fiber optic) connecting the switches, instead of laying new ducts.

Once he had the cables separated everything worked perfectly as before. Mystery solved.