I was swapping out the telephone I use with my Obitalk 110 when I immediately noticed the status light turn red. Simultaneously the internet connection died in my house. I naturally assumed it was the modem and rebooted that. Nope, Rebooted the router. Still did not fix it. I then disconnected the Obitalk and boom, the network was back up. I plugged it back in and the internet went down again and the light stayed red. I disconnected the Obitalk and of course the internet came back. Not seeing a reset button on the Obitalk I disconnected the power for 5 minutes and then powered it back up. The light turned green and the network stayed up.
Would simply unplugging a phone connected to an Obitalk mess up the Obi which in turn messed up the router? Seems to be the case for me.
Under normal circumstances, unplugging a phone would have no effect on your network connection, but there is always the slight possibility that you had a charge of static electricity built up when you were disconnecting your phone and it somehow jumped to your device, somehow causing a cascading failure. This would be a rare occurrence but not entirely impossible, and could happen if you had a high static charge when touching any piece of networked equipment.
That certainly seems plausible. It pays to take heed of the advice to unplug the power adapter from the socket when disconnecting a device that has no on/off switch.