MacBook Pro becoming unresponsive with „failed“ Internet connection?

[Jochheim]

Hello,
since this morning my internet provider is having serious issues and as a result my router cant establish an internet connection. So far, so bad. Strangely since this occurred, my MBP 13“ (2020, 4TB) is going crazy. It is connected Wireless to the router. I get almost constant “Beachballs“ (it sometimes is also not „able„ to spin ...) as soon as i select another App / window. Sometimes it works flawlessl. My bluetooth keyboard is often not recognised (i have to shut it down and reconnect, had never this problem before).

I have since restarted the MBP and also disconnected WLAN, but it is still unresponsive. The activity monitor is not showing anything suspicious. I am not aware, that there is a „real“ airplane mode for macOS. I have never experienced something like this and it could of course be a coincidence. The Macbook is connected to a USB C monitor (but this was the case before). I have the „feeling“, that the MBP constantly tries to connect to iCloud or something like this, but its just a guess. Has anyone of you also experienced something like this or maybe someone knows the answer.

Thanks and greetings
Jochheim

 

[tha_man]

I have similar issue on iMac, if I have connected LAN cable and enabled wifi and internet goes down. The whole system becomes completely unresponsive (wont even shutdown), until I unplug the cable. Weird...

 

[Jochheim]

Thanks for the feedback - i totally forgot, that i also have a LAN cable connected via adapter and as soon as i disconnected the cable, everything was back to normal. Really strange ... luckily the server problems have been mostly fixed and even with a LAN cable the issue is gone now.
I still think that the Mac is „unaware“ that there is no internet connection and iCloud wants to sync all the time throttling the whole system. Seems like a huge oversight from apple, but after several problems with Catalina, there is almost nothing that would really surprise me ...

 

[jerryk]

Hello,
since this morning my internet provider is having serious issues and as a result my router cant establish an internet connection. So far, so bad. Strangely since this occurred, my MBP 13“ (2020, 4TB) is going crazy. It is connected Wireless to the router. I get almost constant “Beachballs“ (it sometimes is also not „able„ to spin ...) as soon as i select another App / window. Sometimes it works flawlessl. My bluetooth keyboard is often not recognised (i have to shut it down and reconnect, had never this problem before).

I have since restarted the MBP and also disconnected WLAN, but it is still unresponsive. The activity monitor is not showing anything suspicious. I am not aware, that there is a „real“ airplane mode for macOS. I have never experienced something like this and it could of course be a coincidence. The Macbook is connected to a USB C monitor (but this was the case before). I have the „feeling“, that the MBP constantly tries to connect to iCloud or something like this, but its just a guess. Has anyone of you also experienced something like this or maybe someone knows the answer.

Thanks and greetings
Jochheim

If your internet provider is having "serious issues" get them to resolve those before spending too much time on this.

 

[tha_man]

Don't blame Catalina this time, it's happening on Mojave too

 

[Fishrrman]

Something that happened to me a week or two ago that may be pertinent to the discussion...

One morning I powered on the Mac (in this case a Mini).
It booted up pretty much as normal, BUT...
After I logged in, everything "went sluggish".
Apps like Safari wouldn't open, I'd just get "the beachball".
Trying to quit was unresponsive.
Opening almost anything was unresponsive.

Nothing had changed from the day before, and nothing else seemed "changed" that was immediately apparent.
I went so far as to boot to internet recovery and do a reinstall of the OS, but the problem persisted.

... Until I found out what the real source of the slowdown/sluggishness was:
Something had gone wrong with the DNS server I use. It wasn't connecting to anything.
I switched to another DNS and... the problems vanished instantly.

But it wasn't immediately apparent (previous to doing this) that this had been the problem -- the OS produced no message that there were DNS-related problems. You had to be wise enough to stumble onto them yourself.

In the meantime, there must be so many "invisible processes" going on behind the scenes (and unseen to the user) that so long as the DNS problems were there, and so long as the processes involved could not connect through the net, the OS was choking and stumbling. THAT was apparent...