AirPort Utility: Restarting Your AirPort Base Station

So you’re trying to watch Netflix, and your network speed has slowed to a crawl. Time to trek to the basement and reboot your modem and your Time Capsule or Airport, right? Wrong! You can start with rebooting your Apple router to see if that fixes the problem, and it’s simple to do from your couch, no actual walking required. Whew, we really dodged a bullet there, guys.

To do this, first you’ll open the Airport Utility program—it’s within Applications> Utilities

Then you should see a hierarchical view of the devices on your network. Click on your base station, or if you have more than a single Apple device configured, click on the one that you think may be misbehaving. It’s usually easiest to start with whichever one is highest up on the chain as a first troubleshooting step, but you can try each of them in turn if necessary.

In any case, then you’ll need to enter the device’s password.

After you gain access, go up to your menus and choose Base Station> Restart.

Easy, right? And if you don’t want to even bother getting up to go to your computer—yes, I AM that lazy sometimes, so sue me—you should know that you can do this same thing from the Airport Utility iOS app, as well, which you can download for free from the App StoreSo to check that out, open the app, and as before, tap on the device you’d like to restart. Then tap “Enter Password” to make changes.

On the following screen, tap “Edit”…

…and then scroll down and select “Advanced.”

After that, “Restart Base Station” is at the bottom. 

Again, pretty easy! Of course, if restarting your Apple device doesn’t fix the problem, you may have to make the onerous trek to reboot your modem. There are usually ways to do that remotely, as well, but explaining what you’d do for every version of every modem out there is far, far outside the scope of this article. I’ve got a life—such as it is—to lead, people. Hearthstone ain’t gonna play itself.