Yes, Your Network Is Down – You Annoyed Us So Much We Crashed It

On Call By the end of a working week, it can be tempting to just blow up whatever tech you've toiled for days to tame. Which is why each Friday The Register offers a (hopefully) cathartic instalment of On Call, the reader-contributed column in which you share your tetchiest tech support tales.

This week meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Iain" who once worked for an IT services provider whose clientele included the publishers of a quarterly magazine.

"They tried their best to come across as big fish business types," Iain told On Call. But anyone who dealt with them came away thinking of the hustlers in a Guy Ritchie movie.

That impression was helped by the fact the publishers were reluctant to pay their bills – or even acknowledge invoices – until they needed something done in a hurry

Which was the situation when Iain took their call.

"We've lost everything, and we're on deadline," the customer complained.

Iain explained he couldn't help. His employer was tired of chasing unpaid invoices, and wouldn't show up unless the backlog was paid – and this site visit paid up front.

"I received a tirade of complaints about how we were holding them over a barrel and that making them wait was jeopardizing the very existence of their business," Iain told On Call. This incident took place in the time before internet banking, so the client added some complaints about the tiresome need to visit their bank to make it happen.

But they eventually paid, and Iain headed to their office – where he found no internet connection and a dead LAN.

Iain logged into the router/switch and found it scrubbed clean of all the credentials and IP addresses that would make the network function – almost as if someone had figured out how to administer a factory reset.

"I suspected the publisher had done some DIY troubleshooting," he told On Call. But the publishers insisted they hadn't touched a thing.

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Iain decided it was a glitch, fixed the router, restored internet and LAN services, and returned to his office.

Later that day, a colleague asked Iain if he had visited the publishers.

Iain explained that he had indeed visited, and reported the strange state of the router.

At which point his colleague spilled the beans.

Earlier in the week, the delinquent client had actually responded to an invoice – by disputing it and claiming to have been over-charged.

"My colleague was so annoyed by that claim, they logged into the router and wiped it," Iain told on Call.

Which was strangely welcome news, because Iain worried he had missed the cause of the problem.

"Yeah, that's why I didn't tell you," his colleague replied. "I wanted to make sure your reaction was genuine."

Iain was not happy about that. "I felt it was unfair he had no faith in my acting skills," he told On Call.

What tactics have you tried to make a recalcitrant client pay up? Don't get into story-sharing debt – click here to send On Call an email so we can give you credit for a story on a future Friday. ®