Internet issues

My internet has been absolute garbage for the last two days. Pages take forever to load and the connection just keeps dropping out on me. I finally decided to reach out to AT&T, and this was their response:

"We can see that the cause of your connection drops is an increase in both download and upload traffic. If you are intentionally running high-bandwidth activities, we recommend limiting them. This type of traffic can be caused by torrents, Dropbox, online gaming, or data syncing to iCloud/Google Drive. Best regards."

I find it hard to believe that any of those things are actually causing my speed to tank like this. Does anyone have any idea what’s really going on?

First off, you might want to check your uTorrent—or whatever torrent client you’re using—to see if both your downloads and uploads are actually moving. It’s also probably worth popping open Task Manager and checking under Performance > Ethernet just to see if there's some random background activity eating up your bandwidth... you know, just in case. If everything looks fine there, I'd say run a full scan with some decent antivirus software; there's a pretty good chance something sneaky hitched a ride on one of those files.

Alright, first things first: you’ve gotta distinguish between bits and bytes. If you’re seeing something like 1 Mbps on your speed test, you actually need to divide that number by 8 to figure out how many Megabytes per second you’re really pulling down when you're downloading stuff.
Then there's the classic one—hardwired Ethernet is always going to be way faster and more stable than trying to rely on Wi-Fi.
It’s also possible someone might be piggybacking off your connection without you knowing, which could explain why your data usage is spiking like this:
Imagine you're just casually browsing some sites while a massive file download is running in the background.
Lastly, and this is probably less common, you might just be dealing with some outdated gear—think old software, an ancient router, or crappy ethernet cables that just can't handle modern speeds.
Hope that clears things up for you!