Technology problems can either be too easy or too complicated.

This employee’s IT team was dealing with a remote site that lost network connectivity every single night at exactly 7:00 PM.

No remote testing could explain why the switches suddenly stopped communicating with each other.

The mystery continued until his boss decided to physically observe what was happening on site.

Check out the full story below to find out more.

7:00 PM Network Outage

Yesterday, I read the post about the 7:00 PM WiFi disappearance.

It reminded me of this one.

It didn’t technically happen to me in person.

It was my team and my boss at the time.

This man was working as an IT support for an oilfield company.

This was maybe some 20 years ago.

I was working IT support for an oilfield service company.

I was taking care of a large operational site along with 5 remote ones.

One of the remote sites was a training center.

They started to have a weird issue.

He noticed that at exactly 7 pm, the building lost connectivity.

Exactly at 7:00 PM, like clockwork, part of the building lost connectivity.

We tried looking for any issues remotely.

We couldn’t find anything wrong.

Only that the distribution switch for that part of the building was unreachable.

His boss visited the location to find out what’s going on.

So, finally my boss visited the location. At 7:00 PM, poof.

He did the troubleshooting.

Both the core switch and the distribution switch were up.

There was no communication between them.

Other distribution switches were connected with no issues.

His boss noticed that the stadium-like lights on the site were being turned on at around the same time.

The next day, he started to observe anything and everything that happened on the site at 7:00 PM.

One of the things he noticed was that this was when it started to get dark.

The security person started making his rounds.

He turned on all the huge stadium-like lights for the site.

And this was the exact moment the connectivity was disrupted.

So, it turns out that these bright lights were causing the connectivity problems.2

Turns out they just installed new lights.

The lazy money-saving contractor extended the high power cable through the network ducts that housed the Ethernet cables.

The Ethernet cables were later upgraded to fiber optic.

The ducts connected the switches. He did this instead of laying new ducts.

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

Mystery solved.

Let’s read the responses of other people to this story.

This person shares another interesting experience.

Yikes! Here’s another interesting story.

This one talks about shielded data cables.

Finally, this user has a similar problem he’s not worrying about.

Even the internet is afraid of the dark… or at least really bright lights.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.