HACKER Q&A
📣 ta-102938

Has your TP Link equipment failed recently?


This morning, I woke up to log into work, and noticed that I was not receiving internet. Turns out that my Archer AX80 just decided that it no longer wants to connect to my modem. This router is less than 6 months old, and it isnt showing thr usual overheat/breakdown symptoms. I want to chalk it up to it just being a lemon, but with the recent talk of TP Link being a target of US national security and the recent administration change, I'm curious if others are having similar issues en masse.

  👤 LinuxBender Accepted Answer ✓
Has your TP Link equipment failed recently?

No. All my L2 switches are TP-Link. A couple of my POE switches are also TP-Link. I have 2 access points that are TP-Link and behind a firewall. None of these have died yet and I have had them for years. I stick with TP-Link as all the weird negotiation issues I've had with the cheap Intel 225 series NICs went away using TP-Link whereas all the other consumer switches I find to be hit-or-miss and I ended up having to force negotiating to specific speeds using idempotent startup scripts that also run in cron for those other switches.

Just guessing but maybe you got a bad one. Try doing a hard reset holding in the pin-hole button on the back and then verify you are on the latest firmware. Also reset your modem in case it has a bad ARP entry.

Regarding security if you suspect an inbound security issue then put the AP behind a firewall. If you suspect a dial-home security issue then tcpdump the AP on your firewall.

👤 bhaney
I stopped buying TP-Link equipment many years ago because of how often the switches I got from them would suddenly fail. I really doubt that your shitty router died because Trump secretly hit its remote kill switch or whatever.