“Massive Connectivity Issues: Asus Routers Crash Due to Bad Security Update”

Asus confirms that many of its routers have been experiencing massive connectivity issues over the past week. The company claims that the issue has now been resolved and that users who restart their routers should no longer experience any issues.

Around May 16, users complained en masse that their Asus routers suddenly suffered from connection problems, discovered Bleeping Computer. For users who rebooted the device, the router stopped working every few minutes because the device memory became overloaded, several victims reported on, among other things the Asus forum in Reddit. It is unclear which routers exactly suffered from this bug.

Asus will now let you know found the cause of the problem. According to the company, it was “an error in the configuration of our server settings”, but no further explanation is given. The company claims that the problems can now be fixed for most users by rebooting the router. If that doesn’t work, Asus recommends saving the current configuration settings and resetting the router to factory settings. Then users can upload the settings back to the router.

ArtTechnica writes that the error may stem from a corrupt definition file for ASD, a built-in security daemon. This component is updated automatically, even if users have automatic firmware updates turned off. Therefore, the problem could not be solved by restoring the firmware version. Presumably, the file system space and memory of the routers became full after getting that file, causing them to crash.