Solving Months of Random Internet Dropouts in a Business Centre

Intermittent IT faults are among the hardest to diagnose. They disappear before you can capture them, and every symptom points in a slightly different direction. This case study is about following the evidence until the real source was found — even when that meant looking beyond the customer's own environment.

The Problem

A business customer based within a managed business centre had been suffering from intermittent IT issues for months. The symptoms were frustratingly inconsistent:

• Internet connectivity would randomly drop.
• Microsoft 365 applications would become slow or disconnect.
• Teams calls would occasionally freeze or fail.
• Problems would disappear before anyone could identify the cause.

Several attempts had been made to resolve the issue, but because the faults were intermittent, no permanent solution had been found.

Our Investigation

Rather than treating each outage as an isolated incident, we began looking for patterns.

We reviewed network configuration, monitored connectivity, tested equipment and eliminated the customer's own infrastructure piece by piece.

Eventually, the evidence pointed beyond the customer's office. The issue wasn't inside their network at all — it appeared to originate within the shared infrastructure provided by the business centre.

Root Cause: External Public IP Address Conflict in Shared Infrastructure

Further investigation identified an external public IP address conflict caused by a network misconfiguration within the business centre's infrastructure.

The conflicting configuration resulted in intermittent routing problems that affected internet connectivity and cloud services — particularly Microsoft 365.

Because the fault originated outside the customer's own environment, it was difficult to identify and easy to overlook. Working with the business centre's IT provider, we presented the evidence and helped trace the source of the conflict.

The Solution

Once the conflicting IP configuration was corrected, the results were immediate. No hardware needed replacing — the customer's own network had been functioning correctly all along.

• Stable internet connectivity.
• Reliable Microsoft 365 access.
• Consistent Teams performance.
• No unnecessary hardware replacement.
• A long-running intermittent fault permanently resolved.

Why This Matters

The hardest IT problems are often the ones that cross organisational boundaries. It is easy to assume the problem lies within your own network, but experienced engineers know that every assumption should be tested.

By following the evidence, eliminating possibilities methodically and continuing the investigation until the true cause was identified, we resolved a problem that had disrupted the customer's business for months.

At Altitude IT Support, we do not stop at the first plausible explanation. We keep investigating until we find the real cause — even when that means looking beyond the obvious and working collaboratively with third-party providers to achieve the right outcome.

For businesses across Manchester, Greater Manchester and the wider North West, our business IT support is built on exactly this kind of methodical troubleshooting.