I had two lightning problems this last week, both rather odd. One was the lightning that struck about 2 blocks away from my customer that traveled down the cable modem, took out the Session Border Controller, Cable Modem (main service on fiber), the router and POE switch! The Grandstream PBX and phones remained functional...after the defective hardware was replaced.
The other was just plain bad karma. It had a surge protector on the Wireless AP, but it was operating at the very edges of the ethernet. A Cisco AP with outdoor antennas, a coil of patch cords on either side of the surge protector, and a raw footage of about 350'. One of the pairs failed distance and the other pair failed RL. Meanwhile, the AP just kept blinking red instead of cycling red amber green. A 1' patch cord on the end of the run solved my problem until the next lightning strike takes down the entire switch
Carl