Power Cycle Sundays

Here at the 'Tea, we like easy, straightforward, unglamorous ways to keep yourself safer. This might be the easiest and most important cybersecurity practice of them all: once a week, power down all your devices. Every single one.

We'll send social media reminders, but feel free to set your own calendar alert or alarm (whatever system you've cobbled together to keep yourself on top of things). Power it all down. Next time you need it, power it back on. Easy peasy.

If you want to just take our word for it, you can stop reading now, and we won't be offended. But if you'd like to know why this is a thing, keep going.

These three terms get used interchangeably, which drives precision-minded people (like me, hi!) a little bit up the wall. They actually mean different things, depending on whether you're talking hardware or software. Let's sort it out.

This is a hardware concept. There is no power going to the device at all. Fully shut down (not "restarted"), and unplugged. This is the thing we want you doing once a week, to everything you own.

This one straddles hardware and software, and it comes with a genuinely delightful bit of computing history.

Rebooting just means restarting a running system, either on purpose or because something went sideways. A cold (or hard) reboot cuts the power entirely and brings the machine back from nothing. A warm (or soft) reboot restarts the system without ever losing power in the first place. "Restart," as a menu option, usually means the soft version: the operating system closes everything out and wraps up its business before starting over.

Here's the fun part. Early computers like the IBM 1401 had no operating system and barely any memory to speak of. You'd feed it a stack of punch cards, hit a button, and the machine would read exactly one instruction: "read a card." That first card would then tell it to read more cards, which eventually loaded up whatever program you actually wanted to run. Engineers thought this looked a lot like the old saying about pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps, and the name stuck. Starting a computer from cold became "booting it up." If it crashed, you rebooted it. The term outlived the punch cards by several decades. (Wikipedia has the full history, if you want to satisfy your inner nerd.)

Despite how often you'll hear it used for the physical act, "reboot" is really a software concept.

A soft reset comes from the software itself. Think Ctrl-Alt-Delete, or hitting "restart" in your Windows menu.

A hard reset is the one you reach for when software stops responding altogether, usually via a dedicated reset button. On some devices (the PlayStation 2, memorably), a quick tap of the power button triggers a hard reset, while holding it down turns the whole thing off. Fair warning: hard resets can occasionally corrupt data, since nothing gets a chance to shut down cleanly first. (Wikipedia again, for the deep dive.)

This is a software concept too (unless the software's being especially stubborn, in which case it edges back toward hardware, in roughly the same spirit as "get a bigger hammer").

All clear? Wonderful. Now let's talk about what a good power cycle actually does for your stuff.

Routers used to be simple little boxes. Then "smart" devices happened (yes, we're putting that in quotes forever), and suddenly your router is the front door to your entire home network.

Routers run on volatile memory (the kind that clears itself out the moment power's gone, unlike your laptop's hard drive), which means power cycling does real work:

In other words, you're evicting any freeloading bad actors from your system. If they've already spread to other devices in your home, you might get reinfected, which is exactly why you're power cycling everything else too, not just the router.

For this practice, all we're asking: unplug the router, wait 30 seconds to a minute, plug it back in. If you've also got a modem, the order matters: power down the router, then the modem, wait 30 seconds to a minute, power on the modem, then the router. (If they're both on the same power strip, flipping the strip off and on at the same moment skips that order, and the router can come up before the modem's finished reconnecting to your provider, which sometimes means doing it all over again. Worth the extra 30 seconds to do them one at a time.)

Choose "shut down," not "restart." Unplug it, wait 30 seconds to a minute until everything's dark, plug it back in, then power on.

Close out your apps first. Power the phone all the way off. Let it sit for a minute. Turn it back on.

Anything else riding on your home network (tablets, smart speakers, the refrigerator that reminds you when you are out of milk) needs a full off-and-back-on, at minimum monthly, weekly if you can manage it. Bonus effect: this practice is a great reminder of exactly how much tech is quietly running in your home, so the next time you hear about some new exploit, you'll actually know whether it applies to you.

Once Power Cycle Sundays become a habit, you'll wonder why you ever thought it was a big deal. It's basic upkeep, the digital equivalent of vacuuming or cleaning out the coffeepot. Skip the maintenance, and the gunk builds up quietly until your carpet feels gross, and your coffee tastes awful.

So let's not do that. Five minutes, once a week. We’ll keep reminding you.

SPONSORED
Every sponsor here is something we actually use or genuinely believe in. Click through if something resonates - it means the world to us and helps keep CybersecuriTea coming your way.

Be the smartest person in the room. 1440 navigates 100+ sources to deliver a comprehensive, unbiased news roundup — politics, business, culture, and more — in a quick, 5-minute read. Completely free, completely factual.

Sign up now!

CybersecuriTea is a free, plain-English guide to digital safety, designed for families, friends, and the folks you love. Subscribe today and get weekly tips to help keep your digital life secure.

Or, if you’d like to support our work and keep the kettle warm for everyone: