You Are Not Connected To The Internet

Status: 10.7.2 — recurrent and confusing problems on several machines that a friend has. Baffling to this person (and me).

Under Mac OS X Lion, waking up my Mac Pro results in dropped internet connection for up to 15 seconds. This is very confusing, and worse.

With my MacBook Air, it took me a reboot (which did not fix anything) and 10 minutes to get the internet to come alive. Clearly something is very wrong with Lion and internet. Readers concur, though some seem to have no issues.

Apple Mail will take accounts “offline”, so that if one clicks to get mail, nothing will happen— forever apparently, no matter how many times one clicks, since Mail determined that there was no internet at some point in the past, so the accounts are offline until forced “online”. This isn’t funny— I had an overdraft notice that arrived a day late, thanks to Apple Mail.

One must manually choose Accounts => Take All Accounts Online to fix it, once the internet is active.

Of course, some people will rat-hole to Network Diagnostics, which will soon discover that the computer is indeed (now) connected after all.

Update August 14, 2011: the problem is much worse than I thought; it sometimes requires a system reboot including a force-quit of Mail to allow the reboot to proceed.

In OS X Lion, internet connectivity drops for up to 15 seconds after waking the computer

Michael S writes

FYI, the issue isn't limited to just the first 15 seconds. I have to go to "join other network" to point the system in the right direction each time I come out of sleep. I called Apple support (second tier) and they said they know of the issue and gave me the temp fix of the afore mentioned instructions. If I reboot there isn't an issue, only coming out of sleep.

Steven B writes

You are not alone. I too am experiencing the same problem though luckily, without the mail portion.

Just updated to 10.7.1 but there is nothing in the documentation on this latest patch that indicates that it targets this issue.