How to Get a Refund From Your ISP for Outages

You ring up about the outages. They see nothing on their side, everything looks fine, have you tried restarting the router. You know it went down three times last week. You can't say when, or for how long, so the call goes nowhere and the bill arrives in full.

What you're actually up against

Most ISPs will credit you for downtime. The catch is that you have to show it, and you have to show it was theirs. From their end an outage in your street and a router locked up in your hallway look the same: your line went quiet. If you can't tell those apart, the call is your word against their screen.

So a refund comes down to three things: the dates and times it went down, how long each one lasted, and something that says the fault was past your router and not in your house.

Why keeping that record yourself is a pain

You'd have to notice each outage as it happens, write down the clock, then remember to write down when it came back, at 2 in the morning, or while you were out and the PC was on its own. Then, for each one, check whether the router was still answering, which means running a ping from a command prompt while the internet is down. Nobody does that. By the time you're on the phone you've got "a few times last week" and nothing else.

How Copper Goose Network Monitor keeps the record for you

It sits in the Windows tray, checks the connection every few seconds, and writes down every problem with a date, a time and how long it lasted. You do nothing.

When the internet goes, it also checks whether your own router is still answering. If the router answers and nothing past it does, the panel says "Router up - check its lights incl. fibre light or ONT box, cables, then ISP", because from your side a dead fibre box and a fault in the street look the same, and the box is the one thing you can go and look at. If your router itself has gone quiet, it says so instead, and that one isn't your ISP's. When the line comes back, the panel tells you what just happened: "Back online - Down for 12 min. The fault was past your router (your ISP)." That's the whole outage, timed and placed, without you touching anything.

Every one of those is kept in History, under Warnings, with when it started and how long it lasted. The Line tab adds it up by month: how much of the time you were up, how many times you were down and for how long in total, split between your ISP and your home network, and the hours of the day that give the most trouble.

For the call, click "Report for ISP..." on the Warnings tab. It saves a plain text file covering the last 30 days that reads like this:

Internet problems on my line, 1 Sep - 30 Sep 2026
(recorded by Copper Goose Network Monitor on my computer)

• Down 3 times, 1 h 12 min in total. Longest: 41 min on Tue 15 Sep from 18:02.
  Each time, my router was working and nothing past it answered.

When it happened:
Tue 15 Sep 18:02 down for 41 min
...

I can send the full log with the measurements on request.

It only includes what the app placed past your router. Wi-Fi, cable and home-router faults are left out, because those aren't your ISP's and putting them in would give them something to argue with. If there was nothing on the ISP's side in the last 30 days, it says so and writes no file, which is worth knowing before you make the call.

What to do with the result

Send the report with your claim, or read it out. Dates, times, durations, and the line about your router working each time. Ask for a credit for the downtime. Most providers have a policy for it and will apply it when the record is in front of them, because arguing with a dated list is more work than paying.

If it says there was nothing on the ISP's side, don't make the call yet. The Warnings tab tells you what it saw each time, cable, Wi-Fi or the router itself, and that's where to look first.

Keep it running. The next outage goes in the record on its own, and the next call starts with the facts.

Free trial, then $14 once. No subscription, no account. It runs quietly on Windows.