Technical problems are rarely as complicated as people make them.

In this story, an IT support specialist spent days dealing with IT teams.

They were blaming everything except their own network.

After days of back and forth, he finally learned what the primary cause of the problem was.

Read the full story below for all the details.

Supporting other IT people is usually better than the general populace. Usually.

I work support for a specific piece of software that runs exclusively on customer servers.

So 99.9% of my calls are directly with IT people from other companies.

The other 0.1% have to transfer me to their IT people because they do not have access to servers.

That usually means I am excluded from tickets that get solved by reboots.

This man was not exempt from being blamed.

But it does not exclude me from week-long finger pointing contests.

“You are totally correct in saying that the other server can’t talk to our service on this server.

But that server can’t ping us at all.

It’s something on your network, not our service.”

He would clearly explain that the problem was on their network.

“Yes. We checked everything on our service just to be sure.”

It’s ready to go and working fine.

It just doesn’t have an internet connection at all.

That’s on your network, not us.”

He was being asked to troubleshoot the network connection.

“Yes, you’ve mentioned that this is the only server affected.

And all your other stuff has an internet connection.

But we don’t manage your network or even this server. It’s all your stuff.

Please troubleshoot the network connection.”

There was no internet.

“Logs are showing a bunch of errors because the server doesn’t have an internet connection.

No other customer is complaining about being unable to connect to the internet.

Between the network errors, the service reports that it’s running fine and ready to go.

It just doesn’t have internet.”

Turns out the issue was caused by a faulty Ethernet cable.

After no less than 10 days of 3 to 5 emails a day like those, I get this gem:

“Issue caused by faulty ethernet cable has been resolved. You may close your ticket.”

10 days of downtime. 1 cable.

Let’s read the reactions of other people.

This one shares a funny response.

This user has a memorable story, too.

Another iT person speaks up.

I feel this pain, says this one.

Finally, short and simple.

Turns out the weakest link really was just… a cable.

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