January 29, 2026
Cloudy with a chance of Wi‑Fi
The WiFi only works when it's raining (2024)
Internet only works when it rains? Commenters bring the storm
TLDR: A true tale of rain-activated Wi‑Fi ended with a simple hardware upgrade fixing interference. Commenters duked it out over causes—tree branches, overheating, and rain cutting radio noise—while trading hacks and jokes, proving household tech can be weird, but the fix can be delightfully straightforward.
The internet only worked when it rained—yes, really. The author’s engineer dad swore by it, and the speed tests backed him up: packet loss vanished when clouds opened up. When storms rolled in, failures dropped from 98% packet loss to a smooth 0%—a jaw‑dropper. It sounded like weather magic. The ultimate fix? Upgrading from old Wi‑Fi gear (the “g” standard) to newer “n,” which better handles interference. But the comments didn’t wait for sunshine. In the HN thread, people flooded in with theories and nostalgia, linking the classic “We can’t send mail farther than 500 miles”, because weird tech mysteries are an internet sport.
The hottest takes: “just prune the trees,” “aim a USB fan at the router before it melts,” and “rain reduces radio noise, so the link cleans up.” One commenter even imagined wet apartment walls acting like mirrors. Cue jokes about scheduling Zoom calls around thunderstorms, watering routers for “cloud computing,” and praying for drizzle. The drama split into camps: heat vs. interference vs. urban mythology, with everyone certain they’d cracked it. The vibe? Delightfully chaotic, surprisingly practical, and very online—because nothing unites the internet like a mystery that turns into a hardware upgrade and a meme.
Key Points
- •The author observed a home Wi‑Fi link that only became usable during rainfall.
- •Dry weather produced about 98% packet loss, while rain reduced loss to 0% within minutes.
- •After rain stopped, packet loss rose again within roughly 15 minutes, making the link unusable.
- •This pattern repeated consistently over several days, confirming a weather correlation.
- •Rain typically degrades wireless links, making the observed improvement during rain counterintuitive and prompting investigation.