How to Restart Your Router and Clear the DNS Cache the Right Way

To restart your router properly, unplug the modem and router, wait until all the lights are off, then plug in the modem first and give it about two minutes. Plug in the router next, then restart your TV devices. To clear the DNS cache, run ipconfig /flushdns on Windows, use the Terminal command on a Mac, and restart streaming devices.

When a restart and a DNS flush actually help

Both steps clear out temporary state: open connections, addresses handed out by the router, and saved name lookups. That fixes problems caused by something going stale. It does nothing for problems with a different cause, such as a slow plan, a wrong password or a channel that is down.

If your problem is in the bottom rows, skip ahead: our posts on evening buffering and login errors cover those properly.

What a power cycle actually does

Home internet equipment is a small computer that runs for weeks without a break. Over time it builds up open connections, tables of which device has which address, and saved DNS answers. Most of this lives in memory, so cutting the power empties it.

When the modem starts again, it reconnects to your provider’s network from scratch. When the router starts, it gets a fresh connection from the modem and hands new local addresses to your devices. Any answers it saved for website and server names are gone, so the next lookup goes out fresh.

That’s why the order matters. The router depends on the modem, and your devices depend on the router. Starting them in the wrong order means a device can ask for a connection before there is one to give.

The right order: modem, router, then devices

Google’s help page for Nest Wifi networks that stop working gives a clear sequence that applies to almost any home setup with a separate modem and router.

1. Unplug the power from the modem, the router and any mesh points or extenders. Wait until every light is off.
2. Plug in the modem only. Wait until it has fully started and its lights are back on. Google says this usually takes about two minutes.
3. Check the cables. Make sure the Ethernet cable between the modem and the router is pushed in at both ends.
4. Plug in the router. Wait until it is fully on, which takes about a minute.
5. Plug in mesh points and extenders, one at a time.
6. Restart your streaming device or TV last, so it joins a network that is already up.

The whole routine takes five minutes. Doing it in a hurry, or plugging everything back in at once, is the most common reason a restart “didn’t work”.

How long to wait at each step

The time with the power off matters less than people think. Equipment makers suggest anywhere from 20 seconds to a minute. Google’s TV help suggests 20 seconds for a Wi-Fi router, Samsung suggests 30 seconds for its TVs, and Amazon suggests one minute for a Fire TV device. Waiting until every light is off covers all of them.

The time after plugging back in matters more. A modem may take a couple of minutes to sync with your provider, and its lights may blink through several colours before they settle. Plug in the router before that and it may start without an internet connection, then sit there until you restart it again.

Use the lights as your guide rather than a stopwatch. When the modem’s internet or online light is steady, move to the next step. Your provider’s manual or support page tells you what each light means for your model.

Reading the lights after a restart

Light colours and labels differ between makers, but the patterns tell a similar story on most equipment. Learning to read them tells you whether to keep waiting, move on, or pick up the phone.

• Power light on, everything else off: the box is still starting. Wait.
• Internet or online light blinking: the modem is trying to connect to your provider. A few minutes of blinking is normal after a restart.
• Internet light steady: the connection to your provider is up. Move on to the router.
• Internet light red, orange or off after ten minutes: the modem can’t reach your provider. Restarting your router or TV won’t change that; check for an outage or call your provider.
• Wi-Fi light off on a gateway: the internet may be fine but the wireless network hasn’t started. Give it another minute, then check the gateway’s app.

Take a photo of the lights when things go wrong. It’s the first thing a provider’s support agent will ask about.

Restarting an all-in-one gateway from your provider

Many homes don’t have a separate modem and router. Internet providers often supply a single gateway that does both jobs and also creates the Wi-Fi network. In that case the order is simpler: one box, then your devices.

• Unplug the gateway, wait until its lights go out, and plug it back in.
• Wait for it to finish starting. Gateways can take several minutes, because they start the modem, the router and the Wi-Fi in turn.
• Use the app if there is one. Many providers have an app or a web page with a restart option, which is gentler than pulling the plug.

On fibre service there may be a second box on the wall, an optical terminal where the fibre line comes in. Treat it like a modem: restart it first, wait for its lights to settle, then restart the gateway.

If you’ve added your own router behind the provider’s gateway, restart the gateway first and your router second. Our guide to router settings for streaming explains how that two-box setup should be configured.

Restarting a mesh Wi-Fi system

A mesh system has one main unit connected to the modem or gateway, and one or more extra points around the home. The main unit has to be online before the others can join it.

Restart in this order: modem or gateway, then the main mesh unit, then each extra point. Google’s steps for its own mesh systems follow exactly this order. Many mesh apps also have a single option that restarts the whole network, which saves walking from room to room.

After a restart, give the points a few minutes to find each other before you test streaming. If one point stays offline, it may be too far from the others; our guide to Wi-Fi, mesh and Ethernet for streaming covers placement.

Extenders, powerline adapters and a second router

Anything that sits between the router and the TV joins the queue after the router. That includes Wi-Fi extenders, powerline adapters that carry the network through your electrical wiring, coax network adapters, and network switches behind the TV.

Each of these needs the router to be up before it can pass traffic. If you restart the router while an extender keeps running, the extender may hang on to a connection that no longer exists, and the TV behind it stays offline while everything else works.

1. Restart the modem, then the router, as above.
2. Unplug each adapter or extender, starting with the one closest to the router.
3. Plug them back in in the same order, waiting until each one’s lights settle.
4. Restart the TV device last.

Powerline adapters work best plugged straight into a wall socket. If one sits on a power bar, moving it to the wall is worth a try while you’re there.

Restarting without pulling the plug

Pulling the plug always works, but it isn’t the only way. Most routers and gateways have a restart option in their app or in the admin page you open in a web browser. The admin address and login are usually printed on a label on the box.

A software restart lets the equipment close its connections in an orderly way, which is slightly gentler. It also lets you restart a gateway that is tucked away in a cupboard or a basement. In a mesh app, the restart option often covers every unit at once.

Some routers can also restart themselves on a schedule, overnight. That’s a setting rather than a fix, and our guide to router settings for streaming explains when it’s worth turning on.

Restart, reset or factory reset?

These three words get mixed up, and the mix-up can cost you an evening. A restart is harmless. A factory reset wipes your network and you’ll have to set it up again.

Before any factory reset, write down your Wi-Fi name and password and any account details your provider gave you for the connection. Google’s own troubleshooting reaches factory reset only after the restart steps and a call to your provider.

What the DNS cache is and why it goes stale

Your player connects to a server by name, but the internet routes traffic by number. The Domain Name System turns one into the other. Each answer comes with a time to live that says how long it can be kept, so devices save answers to avoid asking again.

Those saved answers sit in several layers at once: in the browser, in the device’s operating system, in your router, and at the DNS resolver your router uses. Usually that’s invisible and helpful. It causes trouble when a server moves to a new address and a device keeps using the old one until its saved copy expires.

Clearing the cache forces a fresh lookup. It’s useful after a server change, after you change DNS settings, and when a device insists a server doesn’t exist while other devices reach it fine. It won’t make streams faster. Our guide to the best DNS for streaming explains what DNS can and can’t do for video.

Clear the DNS cache on Windows

Windows keeps its own DNS cache, and you can empty it with one command. Microsoft’s documentation for the ipconfig command describes /flushdns as flushing and resetting the DNS client resolver cache.

1. Press the Windows key, type cmd, and open Command Prompt. Windows Terminal works too.
2. Type ipconfig /flushdns and press Enter.
3. You should see a line saying the DNS Resolver Cache was flushed successfully.
4. Close any app or browser tab that was trying to connect, and open it again.

To see what Windows has saved before you clear it, type ipconfig /displaydns. Entries that come from the computer’s hosts file show up there too, and flushing doesn’t remove them; if someone added a line for your server to that file, it has to be edited out by hand.

If the computer has no internet at all after the router restart, while other devices do, it may still be holding its old local address. In the same window, type ipconfig /release, press Enter, then ipconfig /renew. The first drops the address; the second asks the router for a new one.

Clear the DNS cache on a Mac

macOS has no button for this either, but one line in Terminal does it. Open Terminal from Applications → Utilities, then type:

sudo dscacheutil -flushcache; sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder

Press Return and type your Mac’s password when asked. Nothing appears on screen while you type the password, and there’s no message when it finishes; that’s normal.

The second half of the line is what matters most on current versions. Apple’s archived support article on resetting the DNS cache gives sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder for every version from OS X 10.10.4 onward. The first half clears a second, older cache and does no harm, which is why most guides run both.

Clear the DNS cache in Chrome

Chrome keeps its own small DNS cache on top of the one in your operating system. If a site or web player works in another browser but not in Chrome, clear Chrome’s copy.

1. Type chrome://net-internals/#dns in the address bar and press Enter.
2. Select Clear host cache.
3. For a full clean, go to chrome://net-internals/#sockets and select Flush socket pools. This closes connections Chrome was keeping open.
4. Reload the page.

Other browsers built on the same engine have similar internal pages. If you can’t find one, closing the browser completely and reopening it clears its cache as well.

Fire TV, Android, iPhone and smart TVs

Streaming sticks, TVs and phones don’t have a flush command. Their DNS cache lives in memory, so a full restart clears it along with everything else.

• Fire TV: Settings → My Fire TV → Restart (called Device & Software on some newer models). Afterwards, Settings → Network and the Play/Pause button run a connection test.
• Google TV and Android TV: Settings → System → Restart.
• Android phones: hold the power button and choose Restart.
• iPhone and iPad: turn the device off and on again from the side button, or from Settings → General → Shut Down.
• Smart TVs: unplug the TV from the wall for 30 seconds. The remote’s power button usually only sends it to standby.

Restart the player app too. If it was open during the network restart, it may be holding a dead connection; force stop it as described in our guide to an IPTV app that keeps crashing.

Your router’s cache and public DNS resolvers

Most home routers answer DNS questions for the devices on your network and save the answers for a while. That cache lives in the router’s memory, so the power cycle above clears it. There’s no need for a separate step.

The last layer is the resolver your router uses: your provider’s, or a public one such as Google’s or Cloudflare’s. You can’t restart those. Google does offer a public flush cache tool for Google Public DNS, but it’s meant for website owners who just changed their own records. For a viewer, waiting a few minutes or switching resolver does the same job.

If one resolver keeps giving a wrong answer, changing to another is a reasonable test. The steps for each device are in our DNS for streaming guide.

Testing after the restart

Don’t judge the result in the first minute. Give the network five minutes to settle, then test in this order, so you know where any remaining problem sits.

1. Open a website on your phone over Wi-Fi. If that fails, the problem is still the internet connection, not the TV.
2. Run our IPTV speed test on a device in the same room as the TV. It checks latency, jitter and download speed.
3. Open the player and play a channel you know well, in HD rather than 4K.
4. If HD plays smoothly, try 4K and the channels that failed before.

Write down the speed test result and the time. If problems come back, the same test at the same time on another day tells you whether something changed. High jitter or packet loss points to a different set of fixes, covered in our guide to ping, jitter and packet loss.

A worked example: the player can’t find the server

Here’s how the steps fit together in a common case. Your Fire TV player shows a message about not being able to connect to the server, but your phone browses the web fine over the same Wi-Fi.

1. Rule out the account. If the message mentions a login, password or expiry, this isn’t a network problem. Stop here and check your login.
2. Check a second device. Install the same player on your phone, or sign in on a second TV, and try the same channel. If it works there, the network and our server are fine and the problem is the Fire TV.
3. Restart the Fire TV from its settings menu. That clears its DNS cache and any stuck connections. Open the player again.
4. If it still fails, restart the network in order: modem, router, mesh or extenders, then the Fire TV.
5. Check the server address in the player’s settings, letter by letter, against the details we sent you. One wrong character looks exactly like a network fault.
6. Try another DNS resolver on the router or the Fire TV, if it fails on every device in the house while websites still work.

Most cases end at step 3 or 4. If you reach step 6, contact support before changing more settings; it’s quicker for us to check the server than for you to keep testing.

What not to do

• Don’t press the reset button to restart. On many routers a long press erases every setting.
• Don’t unplug during a firmware update. If the lights are flashing in an unusual pattern after an update notice, wait for it to finish.
• Don’t restart over and over. If two careful restarts didn’t fix it, a third won’t. Each restart also briefly drops every device in the house.
• Don’t plug everything in at once. The router starts faster than the modem and comes up without a connection.
• Don’t expect more speed. A restart clears faults; it doesn’t raise the speed your plan delivers.

Still not working? What to tell your provider or us

If every device lost the internet and a careful restart didn’t bring it back, call your internet provider. Tell them you restarted the modem and router in order, how long you waited, and what the modem’s lights show now. Ask whether there’s an outage in your area, and whether anything changed on your account.

If the internet works but our channels don’t, message Online Support. Say which device and player you use, what the screen shows, and that you’ve restarted the network and cleared the DNS cache.

Include your speed test result. With those details we can tell quickly whether it’s your connection, your device or our side. Our IPTV Canada plans include that help on every account, and the nine buffering fixes are the next stop if channels play but stutter.

Questions people ask