I've been noticing small disruptions on my router recently. Roughly around 5-10 seconds, not enough to notice while browsing the net, but enough to knock off VPNs, kill game sessions, disrupt meetings. I see it happen simultaneously on my laptop (wifi) and my desktop (ethernet), so it's not a wireless specific issue and it's not a computer specific issue.

First thing I did was reboot my router, quick and easy thing to try. This didn't solve the issue.

Second thing I did was check the logs (Advanced -> System Tools -> System Log). There was virtually nothing in the log, so I enabled debug level logging, rebooted the router one more time and waited for the issue to crop back up. After the issue repeated, there still wasn't anything at all in the logs other than mundane entries for DHCP.

Since I wasn't seeing anything in the logs, the firmware was up to date, and a reboot wasn't clearing the issue, next step is to see if maybe the issue is at the modem level. So I left a ping request for the router and for Amazon running in the background. Next time the issue cropped up, sure enough, I'm dropping packets to both the net and the router, which points to the router being the source of the issue, not the modem.

I'm a little lost for next steps at this point. I'm not getting any errors at all in the web portal log and I can't find any documentation anywhere that suggests that this model has ssh access, so I can't try pulling the logs directly off the router to see if there's errors the portal isn't displaying. Since I know there's a problem, but I have absolutely no insight from the device about what might be going wrong, I'm turning it over to the brain trust. Anyone got any helpful ideas about what to try next? I bought this router back in March 2020, so it's not much more than 6 months old at this point. Way too young to be having hardware issues, one would hope.