Wi-Fi Was Dead for 5 Hours While Chrome Kept Working: 4,960 DNS Failures and the 5-Minute Probe That Catches Them
Last time I wrote about how many jobs you should re-run the moment your quota comes back . This post goes back a few days earlier, to a quieter and far more annoying problem: the morning my home Wi-Fi was effectively dead for five hours — while the browser kept loading pages as if nothing were wrong. The problem: the browser works, but only the jobs die On the morning of 2026-09-12, four…
On September 12, 2026, four automated jobs stopped functioning one after another. The issues were Node fetch failed and Python getaddrinfo failures. Despite these job failures, browsing with Chrome appeared unaffected. Despite the network appearing functional, certain processes still failed. The airportd process had emitted SlowWiFiDnsFailure at an unusual frequency.
Within a 24-hour period, there were 4,960 instances of this error. The occurrence intensified between 05:43 and 11:00, peaking at 1,720 failures in the 10th hour, before ceasing at 12:38. The interruption occurred at 13:09 when the user switched from home Wi-Fi to their phone's tethering. The investigation revealed that only the DNS path was malfunctioning.
Chrome utilizes its own DNS resolution (DoH plus a cache), allowing it to continue even when the home router's DNS is malfunctioning. Node and Python directly access the system resolver (home router's DNS) and become stuck. The misconception that the browser functioning meant the network was fine was the root cause of the diagnostic error.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
