You wake up, grab your phone, and suddenly the home Wi-Fi refuses to connect. Other devices may work — or nothing connects at all — but the problem started right after the router restarted overnight. This is common, and in most cases the phone is holding onto outdated network information.
Quick answer: forget the Wi-Fi network on your phone and reconnect to it manually. A router restart often changes small connection details, and phones don’t always refresh them correctly.
Why this happens
When a router reboots, it rebuilds its network session from scratch. During that process it may assign a new internal IP address range, refresh security keys, or briefly broadcast incomplete connection data while starting up.
Your phone, meanwhile, still tries to reconnect using yesterday’s saved settings. Instead of negotiating a fresh connection, it keeps attempting to reuse information that no longer matches the router. The result looks like endless “Connecting…” messages, authentication errors, or immediate disconnects.
Start with the fastest fix
- Open Settings on your phone.
- Go to Wi-Fi.
- Tap your home network name.
- Select Forget or Remove Network.
- Wait about 10 seconds.
- Select the network again and re-enter the Wi-Fi password.
This forces the phone to request completely new connection details from the router. In many cases, the connection works immediately after this step.
If it still won’t connect
Try these in order. Each one targets a slightly different cause.
Turn Wi-Fi off and back on
Disable Wi-Fi for about 20 seconds, then enable it again. This clears temporary wireless sessions that sometimes survive a router reboot.
Restart the phone
Phones can keep cached network states longer than expected. A quick restart resets the wireless driver and forces a clean handshake with the router.
Restart the router again — slowly
If multiple devices struggle to connect, power the router off for a full minute. Turn it back on and wait until all indicator lights stabilize before reconnecting devices. Connecting too early can recreate the same issue.
Check for duplicate networks
Some routers broadcast both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz networks with similar names. After a restart, your phone may jump between them and fail authentication. Try connecting to only one band if both appear.
Less common but real causes
If the password suddenly fails even though it hasn’t changed, the router may have reset security mode during reboot (for example, switching between WPA2 and mixed WPA2/WPA3). Logging into the router settings and confirming the security type usually resolves this.
A practical tip
If your router performs scheduled overnight restarts, give it a few minutes each morning before using Wi-Fi heavily. Devices reconnect more reliably once the network has fully stabilized.
After reconnecting the network manually, the phone should stay connected normally again.