Internet works, but not browsers?

Pookie Bear

Pookie Bear

Pookie Bear

Soldato
Joined
28 Jun 2006
Posts
5,225
Location
Newcastle upon Tyne
I'm having a very odd problem.

Yesterday, my Chrome stopped working. Every page I tried to connect to timed out. I tried Edge and had the same problem. So I finished my DNS, renewed my IP and nothing helped. I rebooted my PC and for about 3 minutes, everything worked, then it started doing the same thing. So through this, I could point websites through the command line, but my browsers time out.

In the brief moments each was working after a reboot, I downloaded Opera and Firefox, and it happened to them too.

I ran my malware checker and anti-virus but found nothing suspicious.

After trying everything I could think of, I did some Google searching and tried everything there too. In the end, I gave up and used the PC Reset option to wipe everything r except personal files from my PC, and used it to reinstall Windows from the Cloud. Afterwards, everything worked fine.

This morning, after two hours of use, it happened again. I was reading a post on Reddit, clicked a few links which all worked, then all of a sudden one of if them didn't work.... and more all my browsers have stopped working again. I can ping Google and Facebook from the command line, but my browsers time out.

I'm at a total loss. Any help or advice greatly appreciated!
 
Oddly enough trying to go on TotalAV's site, uBlock Origin blocks it under its badware list.

I would be tempted to disable it and see if the issue crops up. If TotalAV installs any extensions/add-ons as well, disable those too.
 
Tried restarting your router? The DNS/cached clients part may have corrupted and as leases are fairly lengthy and caches don't really clear all that often, might be worth a shot.

You could verify it's not the router's DNS etc though fairly easily.

1: Ping a website and gets its IP, try to load the page via the IP instead of the hostname in a browser.
2: Hotspot onto your phone's 4G (or USB wired tether) and see if that allows the browsers to load pages normally. Be sure to disable the Ethernet too else Windows has a bit of a faff about what adapter to use etc.
 
Thanks for the comments, everyone. I found the problem.

After a night of normal use, I had a look at the programmes I'd installed this morning. A fairly innocuous list, until I got to Nord VPN. I rarely use my VPN, but it's nice to have now and then (for pirate themed trips), and since my previous woes had occurred whether or not my VPN was enabled, I'd discounted it.

Turns out that something was tripping Nord's Kill Switch - which only turned off my browsers, and nothing else (I could still play CoD, or Valheim for example).

So a 30 second fix which took several hours to resolve!
 
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