sorry to hear but it might be the wire worse case scenario you might need to go to a computer shop to see if they can back it up

Damn. Hopefully not everything is lost and you can get it backed up

I literally had a similar situation happen with a pen drive I carry around with me all the time in my pocket and slowly it started to get more finnicky to connect and going loose until one day it just stopped connecting altogether. Turns out the connector was just stuffed with lint I kid you fucking not, so I scraped it out and the drive started working again no problem.

I know it might not be the solution to your situation but good luck.

Depending on what type of external drive it is, it could just be a dead enclosure controller. Oftentimes that dies, but the drive inside is ok. If you're able in taking things appart, you could attemt to extract the drive and get another adapter. Often, if its a brand drive, you can find a teardown guide. Alternatively a electronics or computer repair shop could attemt it for you. Finaly there a data recovery companies, but that way can be costly.