For over 24 hours, my PC (windows 7 64bit) was unable to receive anything from the internet. My IP is AT&T (high-speed DSL), and I use Outlook as my email frontend.

The basic symptoms were the ability to send but not receive email, and to send website requests but go no further beyond the “website found; waiting for response from” display. The only exception was immediately after each modem reboot. After each such reboot, 1 thing would be received, then the errors resumed. Eg, if I invoked email immediately after the reboot, and there was mail to be received, I’d see the “receiving x of y” display, receive 1 of the emails, and then either error 0x8004210A (no response from receiving POP server) or 0x800CCC08 (unknown error). If I 1st invoked the internet (IE9 or Chrome, there was no difference), my homepage would display, but further activity resulted in the “waiting for response from” limbo.

Resolution attempts included uninstalling that morning’s Microsoft updates, rebooting and even resetting the NetGear modem (only 5 months old), contacting AT&T about service outages, over 2 hours with AT&T support and whatever diagnostics they run, checking and reconnecting all cables, and having Best Buy techs check my ethernet cable, and regressing the system back to its previous restore point (4 days earlier).

Several hours after all the above had no effect, and over 24 hours since the problem began, everything was suddenly fixed and has been OK ever since. I’ve even reinstalled all the system updates, and all is well.

Have you ever encountered this before? If so, what was it?

At first I thought you may have had some virus infection that was blocking/ hijacking your traffic - but that it suddenly cleared up like that indicated to me an ISP problem.

Yes you were with AT&T support for 2 hours but the people you are talking to are front end, not on the back end networking and are not necessarily informed of actual issues or often don't get informed for quite some time (partly because no one really knows at the start what is wrong and it takes a while for enough reports of the same incident to build up etc etc, and partly because of the politics and PR of it sometimes these things are only partly or not at all communicated broadly or even internally). My best guess is AT&T had a problem. But you will probably never get them to admit even if it is true.

Perhaps run some malware/spyware/virus scanning software (if possible something that you don't currently use as obviously it is not reporting anything now anyway - but you could use what you have to do a "deep" or more intensive scan) - if all clear I would say it was AT&T and forget it. :)

Thank you, GlennGlenGlenn. "Deep" scans (like your term) have been, and all reported no findings. After hour 37, we even bit the bullet and had a $150 PC housecall. That tech ran specialized scans and registry stuff way beyond my little ol' programmer's understanding.

Your suggestion that it was something on AT&T's end makes much sense in light of the symptoms, and since everything thought of so far on this end has been ruled out as the possible culprit.

The poor kid who was helping me at AT&T was really trying his brains out. He even asked around among the other service reps when he'd exhausted the troubleshooting script they're all given. What a tough job to go to every day.

Again, much thanks. You've put my mind at ease.

I have worked in such call centers myself and I know what it is like and sometimes you are even told by the higher level technicians and your boss that there is NO PROBLEM - only to find out later (hours or days later) that there was! Some companies handle it better than others, sometimes the problem is actually discovered until later than when you are raising it, but some have an outright policy of non-communication!

If you've had the techies out and do full search for viruses and problems and it is clean I would almost bet my last dollar that it was indeed AT&T.

Glad to help. Thought it was a very interesting one.

Cheers :)