Random ERR_NETWORK_IO_SUSPENDED in Windows applications (network itself *is* working)

Anonymous
2022-01-18T18:49:57+00:00

Quite often Windows applications are stuck (frozen) with error ERR_NETWORK_IO_SUSPENDED.

(Typically observed in Chrome, but impacts also any other application, e.g. Edge)

When:

  • after returning from sleep mode
  • *but also* at random time

For how long:

  • several minutes
  • then the applications automagically resume to normal behaviour

What is impacted:

  • all Windows applications at the same time
  • except WSL, that is *not* affected (e.g. I can do a curl without any problem)

Network itself is not the cause!:

  • other devices in my LAN still have access to Internet during the incidents
  • WSL still has access to Internet too!

I had the impression I could have solved the issue after forcing a downgrade/upgrade of Windows, but the problem is there again (maybe since the last Windows update). Windows version is up to date. Already tried to reboot many times, of course. To no avail.

This issue is extremely frustrating, when you are are stuck in the middle of a sentence and have to look at your laptop during long minutes before being able to finish typing. (BTW, got stuck twice while typing the present question!)

I'm quite desparate with this. Don't even have a clue on how to investigate. Did not find anything interesting in Event Viewer.

Context:

  • Surface_Book_3_1900
  • Windows 10 Home 10.0.19044

Moderator note - Moved from Windows to Surface.

Surface | Surface Book | Network

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

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  1. Anonymous
    2022-05-21T10:52:09+00:00

    I've got the exact same issue as everyone's described, with the issue persisting from 10 to 11 (with a fresh install on a wiped drive).

    ASUS Zephyrus G15 GA503QR, bought a month or so ago.

    A large part of the OS is unusable during this issue, which usually persists for a few minutes. Restarting explorer.exe fixes the start menu, search, and windows app issues.

    Microsoft Teams and Discord are disconnected as if there was no internet while this issue persists (usually a few minutes), they both run bundled JavaScript frameworks run on the Chrome V8 engine (Angular and Electron respectively). Restarting doesn't always seem to fix it, or only temporarily fixes it.

    Firefox is also effected but in a weird way - searching using the URL bar with my default SE as DuckDuckGo, it won't load the result until I load another website (i.e Microsoft.com) in a new tab.

    Steam (gaming platform app) webpages don't load at all, displaying an "error -301" message which seems like an internal error code that's not documented, as I can't figure out what it means.

    Usual troubleshooting steps followed. It don't think it could be the network adapter or driver given this happens on both ethernet and wifi, and other apps do stay connected to the internet, pinging any known active IP works.

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  2. Anonymous
    2022-05-19T14:42:54+00:00

    Facing the same issue on a Lenovo ThinkPad P15, Windows 10 Enterprise.

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  3. Anonymous
    2022-05-18T13:31:50+00:00

    This shouldn't have moved to Surface as it's happening to a lot of non surface PC's. It's happening to my Dell Latitude 5510, and still happening after a full re-install of Windows 10. It mostly happens to me randomly, like the most recent one happened 30 minutes after I woke up my laptop. Like OP, when the issue is happening, I can't open my start button menu, I CAN ping out to everything I try as well, and my desktop right next to it works the whole time. It happens on different networks outside of my house as well. I'm going to try Windows 11, but as someone has already tried it and it didn't work, I'm not too hopeful. This isn't something a non-dev is going to be able to help with by pasting in canned troubleshooting messages.

    I have tried:
    SFC, DISM
    Virus / Malware scans
    Re-installing network adapters
    Trying just WiFi or just ethernet
    Rolling back Windows updates to a few different points
    Checking event logs (never anything useful during, before or after)
    Uninstalling programs I thought might be causing it (Virtualbox messing with my network adapter was my thought)
    Updating every driver I could find, and the BIOS
    Re-install of Windows 10 when nothing else worked (2 weeks later it's happening again with only office and chrome installed)

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  4. Anonymous
    2022-05-08T10:12:28+00:00

    same problem, someone found solution already?

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  5. Anonymous
    2022-04-23T22:34:33+00:00

    I had this on my old Surface Book 3 but that had all sorts of problems so I put it down to that. However I have now got a new Surface Pro 8 and I am seeing this exact same behaviour. I use Edge as my main browser and at completely random intervals it will suddenly display that ERR_NETWORK_IO_SUSPENDED error in the browser instead of loading pages. Then after a few minutes it goes back to normal.

    Interestingly I've noticed that new-style apps like Settings and Microsoft Store do not load for as long as this persists - if you launch them they just open a blank window with the app icon in the middle and stay stuck like that until the browser returns to normal.

    Definitely something very weird going on with Windows. Like others I'd say this started (on my old device) early in 2022, roughly.

    Microsoft need to address this with an update, urgently! Is anyone from Microsoft even looking at this or going to reply to help us?

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