How to fix the ‘ethernet unplugged’ problem on Apple Airport Extreme

I have a 2009 Apple Airport Extreme. Quite often,  once a week or so,  I was losing my Internet connection and I would have to reboot  the base station to fix it.  After reading a few forums I discovered there is a bug in the most recent Apple AirPort Extreme base station firmware. Here is how to fix it by reverting back to an older version.

Firstly, the problem looks like this.

My Internet stops working and when I open the ‘Airport Utility’ my base station has this little red error  alert:

When I click on the base station I see this error report:

It is saying that my Ethernet is unplugged. But my Ethernet is not unplugged!

I can unplug my Ethernet cable and plug it back in,  the problem remains.  If I turn the base station off and then on again the problem is fixed –  until it happens again…

Now according to the forums,  this is a bug in Apple’s latest  Airport firmware. (Firmware is the software that lives in your  Airport Extreme base station and tells it what to do.)

Thankfully, you can tell your Airport Extreme router to go back to an older version of the firmware.

To do this you need to open  your “Airport Utility’  and click on your AirPort  Extreme base station.

You will see the little speech bubble kind of thing that pops up to the right with all the information about your Base station like this:

If you go to the ‘version’ and press the ‘option’ key, you can select a different version of the firmware!

I told it to go back to version 7.6.1 and all the problems were fixed. You don’t need to go back all the way to version 7.5.2. Version 7.6.1 seems to do the job.