Many users at home and abroad reported that around May 16, the ASUS server pushed the wrong firmware update, causing the ASUS router system to overflow memory. This problem greatly affected Wi-Fi performance and even disconnected the network.
At present, this problem involves multiple models, including various models of Wi-Fi 5 and Wi-Fi 6 specifications.
ASUS acknowledged the issue today, writing on its Product Security Advisory support page, “During routine security maintenance, our technical team discovered an error in the configuration of the server settings file, which may cause network Connection lost.”
The company later said its team “urgently resolved the server issue” and that routers that were previously offline should now be up and running. If restarting does not solve the problem, please save the configuration file of the current user, then restore the factory default settings and upload the configuration file again.
While we still don’t know exactly what caused this global outage, it’s clearly not a minor issue. Reddit user TheDeviceMangler pointed out that it may be that the ASUS router’s built-in security daemon applies a corrupt configuration file in the update package. This occurs because the component is updated frequently and operates independently of the device firmware.
According to TheDeviceMangler, when routers automatically update and fetch corrupted configuration files, they keep taking up filesystem space and causing the memory to run out, bringing down the network.
