Weird networking problems

[alms]

My son just installed Big Sur on his 2019 MacBook Air, and he is having some very weird networking problems.

• Safari thinks he's not connected to the Internet, most of the time. Occasionally it will load a page, but usually he just gets a message that he's not connected to the Internet.
• Discord thinks he's not connected to the Internet. When he launches, he just gets the alert that it wasn't able to update. Occasionally it will manage to update.

But

• Chrome works fine. No problems. Loads web pages, etc.
• Firefox works fine.
• Maps.app works fine. It is clearly loading content from the Internet.
• Messages works fine.
• Going into Terminal, we are able to ping servers on the Internet.

This happens when he's connected via wifi and when he's connected via wired ethernet.

We have checked multiple users on his computer, and it happens on all of them.

Anyone have any ideas what's going on here? I've been poking around and so far I'm stumped. The next thing I'm looking at is to wipe his Mac and reinstall Big Sur from scratch and see if that helps, and then just restore his documents and apps from a backup, hopefully without restoring the problem.

 

[Wizec]

I installed Big Sur as an upgrade and had all kinds of app hanging issues. I decided to erase the disk and reinstall Big Sur from scratch.

After a clean installation of Big Sur, I couldn't ping some devices on my network, browse SMB shares, nor browse to some http services in my home.

I ran the built-in Wireless Diagnostics utility which told me that my WiFi appeared to be working normally. Since I ran that utility, all my network issues are resolved. 🤷‍♂️

 

[RumorConsumer]

I have had very similar issues on my 2019 16" MacBook Pro. Clean installed. Issues persist. No rhyme or reason between safari and chrome etc. Looks like DNS resolution issues at first but then pages load kind of half way and then stop. No bueno. I am betting 11.1 helps out a lot.

 

[blackkidmarley]

i cant wait to get Big Sur on my brand new Mac Mini

 

[Coach50]

Yes, I'm having fluctuating problems with internet, running Big Sur 11.1. One second I have a connection, then suddenly it's gone.
It seems to switch my IP address to a self-assigned one from time to time, but I still have problems with connecting at times when this hasn't happened. Weird.
A safe reboot, restart, and running wireless diagnostics helped. It seemed the upgrade stripped out my DNS addresses, which I've manually put back. Fingers crossed now the connection remains stable...

 

[steve62388]

Before you go to the time and effort of reinstalling...

Previously I had some really weird network problems, the only thing that resulted in a fix was deleting the configuration files, I assume mine got corrupted somehow. They rebuild on next boot. I don’t know if this method is still valid under Big Sur (with the changes in system partitions etc), but it’s worth a try.

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