No icon indication that I am offline

[debodun]

My modem went offline due to a power surge. Usually when that happens there a yellow triangle with an exclamation point in it superimposed over the network icon in the taskbar. However, there was no yellow triangle this time. Is this unusual?

 

[wither 2]

I'm no expert but, if the modem rebooted, I wouldn't expect any yellow triangles.

 

[file3456]

The yellow triangle you see when there's no Internet connection will come up if the OS can't ping an IP that Microsoft uses from a CDN (Content Delivery Network) called Akamai. Akamai is in fact used by lots of websites for their CDN uses. It's just that Microsoft uses it for all the computers around the word for pinging purposes to let you know if in fact you have an Internet connection or not. Now if the yellow triangle didn't show up then that could be one of two reasons. 1) You still had Internet or at least Windows was able to successfully ping the Akamai IP address. Or 2) I'm not sure about this. The time period at which the OS checks to see if there is an Internet connection wasn't up so it didn't perform the check in the short time you may have been without Internet access.

Now in case you or someone else is wondering. If you're using WIFI and see the yellow triangle and in fact can't load a web page yet still see signal strength bars. That's because there is in fact no Internet connection to the outside world, but your router is still giving you its local connection. Try this out once. If you ever have a loss of Internet, log in to your router. It'll allow you to do so because it's your own local network connection. Non Internet dependent.