According ot various reports, many users of Belkin routers are having problems connecting to the internet as of last night. It appears that the router will occasionally ping heartbeat.belkin.com to detect network connectivity, but the "heartbeat" host is not reachable for some (all?) users. Currently, the host responds to ICMP echo requests, but apparently, many Belkin routers are still down.

As a workaround, you can add an entry to the routers host file pointing heartbeat.belkin.com to 127.0.0.1. This appears to remove the block. The "block" only affects the DNS server on the device. It will route just fine. You can still get hosts on your network to work as long as you set a DNS server manually, for example using Google's DNS server at 8.8.8.8. .

For a statement from Belkin, see https://belkininternationalinc.statuspage.io

In a tweet, Belkin also pointed to this page on its community forum: http://community.belkin.com/t5/Wireless/Belkin-Routers-Internet-Outage/m-p/5796#M1466

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Johannes B. Ullrich, Ph.D.
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