Fix This Site Can’t Be Reached in Chrome

“This site can’t be reached” is Chrome’s catch-all network error — it covers everything from a simple DNS lookup failure to a full internet outage, which is exactly what makes it frustrating to diagnose. The error message itself is almost useless. What actually matters is the sub-code displayed beneath it, and most people walk straight past it. You’ll find the complete rundown in our Google Chrome Errors.

Before you do anything else, look at the smaller grey text under the “This site can’t be reached” headline. It will say something like ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED, ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT, or ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED. That sub-code tells you what Chrome actually tried and where it failed. Without it, you’re guessing. Write it down or take a screenshot before you start clicking anything.

What the Sub-Code Tells You

Different sub-codes point to entirely different problems. The fixes below are organised around them, so knowing which one you’re looking at cuts the troubleshooting process significantly.

• ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED — Chrome could not convert the domain name into an IP address. This is a DNS problem. Start with Fix 2 (flush DNS) and Fix 3 (switch DNS server).
• ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT — Chrome found the server but never got a response. Could be the server being down, a firewall silently dropping packets, or a very slow connection. Fix 1 and Fix 4 apply.
• ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED — The server actively rejected the connection. Usually the server is down or a specific service isn’t running. This one gets its own dedicated guide because the causes and fixes are distinct.
• DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN — DNS lookup succeeded but the domain doesn’t exist in the database. Check the URL carefully first — a typo in the domain produces this exact error.
• ERR_NETWORK_CHANGED — The network changed while Chrome was loading the page. Usually caused by a Wi-Fi reconnect or VPN toggling. A simple reload (F5) fixes this almost every time.

I’ve seen “This site can’t be reached” appear on the same machine in the same week for completely different reasons — once because my ISP’s DNS servers were down, another time because a Windows Update had added a firewall rule blocking a specific site. Both showed the identical error page. The sub-code was what revealed they needed completely different fixes.

This Site Can’t Be Reached Fix 1: Rule Out the Obvious

Before running any commands or changing any settings, spend two minutes on these checks. They resolve a surprisingly large percentage of cases.

Open a completely different website — not the same domain, not a subdomain. If nothing loads anywhere, your internet connection is likely down rather than a Chrome-specific issue. On a router, the fix is usually just to unplug it from power, wait 60 seconds, and plug it back in. Give it 2 minutes to fully reconnect before testing.

Try the same site on your phone using mobile data (turn WiFi off first). If it loads there, the problem is specific to your PC or your home network. If it also fails on mobile data, the site itself is likely down — check a service like Downdetector or just search “[site name] down” to see if others are reporting the same issue.

Try Chrome Incognito mode (Ctrl + Shift + N). Incognito runs without extensions, which rules out ad blockers, VPNs, and privacy tools as the cause. If the site loads in Incognito but not in a normal window, an extension is the culprit — disable them one by one under the Extensions menu to find which one.

Restart Chrome fully — not just close the window. Open Task Manager (Ctrl + Shift + Esc), click More details if needed, find every “Google Chrome” process and end them all, then relaunch. A Chrome process stuck in a bad network state can cause “This site can’t be reached” repeatedly until it’s fully restarted.

This Site Can’t Be Reached Fix 2: Flush the DNS Cache

When the sub-code is ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED, Chrome (and Windows) cached a failed DNS result and is continuing to use it even after the underlying problem has resolved. Flushing the cache forces a fresh lookup. This was the fix during my ISP’s DNS outage — once their servers came back up, flushing the cache let Chrome find the correct addresses immediately instead of waiting for the stale failed entries to expire on their own (which can take hours).

1. Open Command Prompt as administrator (search “cmd”, right-click, Run as administrator)
2. Type ipconfig /flushdns and press Enter
3. You should see “Successfully flushed the DNS Resolver Cache”
4. In Chrome, navigate to chrome://net-internals/#dns and click Clear host cache
5. Also click chrome://net-internals/#sockets → Flush socket pools
6. Reload the site

If you’re getting DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN on a site that was working recently, also consider whether the domain might have expired. Domain registrations lapse, and when they do, the DNS records disappear and every browser returns NXDOMAIN. It’s worth doing a quick WHOIS lookup on the domain to check its registration status if the site has been unreachable for more than a day.

This Site Can’t Be Reached Fix 3: Switch to a Reliable DNS Server

If flushing the DNS cache doesn’t fix it and ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED keeps appearing, your ISP’s DNS servers are likely slow, experiencing an outage, or blocking specific domains. Switching to a public DNS server like Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 or Google’s 8.8.8.8 bypasses whatever your ISP’s servers are doing.

1. Settings → Network and internet → click Wi-Fi or Ethernet
2. Click your active connection
3. DNS server assignment → Edit → Manual
4. Enable IPv4
5. Preferred DNS: 1.1.1.1 (Cloudflare — fastest for most locations)
6. Alternate DNS: 8.8.8.8 (Google)
7. Save and test immediately

I made this switch permanently years ago and have never gone back to ISP DNS. Cloudflare’s resolver is consistently faster than most ISP-provided DNS, and it resolves “This site can’t be reached” errors caused by ISP DNS issues without any ongoing maintenance. The switch takes two minutes and there’s genuinely no downside to it for home use.

This Site Can’t Be Reached Fix 4: Reset the Network Stack

If “This site can’t be reached” appears across multiple sites, multiple browsers, and even after the router restart, the Windows network stack itself may have become corrupted. This sounds dramatic but is actually fairly common after major Windows updates or after certain network management applications install and then uninstall. The fix is a full network stack reset — it returns all the underlying networking components to a clean default state.

Open an Administrator Command Prompt and run each of these in order:

netsh winsock reset
netsh int ip reset
ipconfig /release
ipconfig /flushdns
ipconfig /renew

Restart the PC after all commands complete. Don’t skip the restart — the Winsock reset in particular requires a reboot to take full effect. After restarting, test the site that was showing “This site can’t be reached.”

This fix is particularly effective when the error appears in multiple browsers simultaneously, which rules out Chrome-specific issues. If Firefox, Edge, and Chrome all show connection errors to the same sites, the problem is almost certainly at the network stack level rather than any browser’s configuration.

This Site Can’t Be Reached Fix 5: Check Firewall, Antivirus, and Hosts File

Two other causes are worth checking when nothing else has worked — particularly if “This site can’t be reached” appears on one specific site while everything else loads fine.

Firewall and antivirus: Both can block specific sites or domains. To test the firewall, go to Settings → Windows Security → Firewall and network protection → click your active network → toggle Defender Firewall off temporarily. Test the site immediately, then turn the firewall back on. If the site loads with the firewall off, a firewall rule is the cause — check Windows Security’s recent activity log to see what’s being blocked. For antivirus, look for a Web Shield, Web Protection, or URL filtering option and disable it temporarily to test.

Hosts file: The hosts file on Windows can redirect or block specific domains entirely, and “This site can’t be reached” appears on those domains regardless of how healthy the rest of the network is. Malware, parental control software, and network management tools sometimes write to the hosts file without much notice. To check it, open Notepad as administrator, go to File → Open, navigate to C:WindowsSystem32driversetc, change the file type to All Files, and open the file named “hosts.” Look for any line containing the domain that’s failing. Delete any suspicious entries, save, and test.

Quick Reference by Sub-Code

For DNS failures affecting all browsers, our guide on DNS server not responding goes deeper into Windows-level DNS diagnostics. For the ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED variant of this error, there’s a dedicated guide covering server-side connection refusals. Additional network troubleshooting documentation is available on the Google Chrome support pages, which includes steps for enterprise environments where proxy configuration and DNS-over-HTTPS settings affect how connection errors appear.

One scenario that trips people up: “This site can’t be reached” appearing after switching from a wired connection to Wi-Fi, or after a laptop wakes from sleep. In these cases the network adapter has reconnected but the IP lease or DNS assignment hasn’t fully refreshed. A quick fix is to open Command Prompt and run ipconfig /release followed by ipconfig /renew — this forces the adapter to get a fresh IP address and DNS configuration from the router. It takes about ten seconds and resolves the “just switched networks” variant of this error without needing to restart Chrome or the PC.

Corporate network users often encounter “This site can’t be reached” on external websites that work fine at home. This is usually intentional — corporate firewalls block certain categories of sites — but it can also be caused by split-DNS configurations that route internal domain lookups through corporate DNS while external lookups should go through normal DNS. If the corporate VPN is active and external sites are failing, check whether your VPN has a split-tunneling option that lets non-corporate traffic bypass the VPN entirely. Many IT teams configure VPNs to route all traffic through the corporate network, which can introduce DNS resolution and connectivity issues for sites that work fine on a direct connection.

For intermittent “This site can’t be reached” errors that appear randomly and then resolve on their own — especially on Wi-Fi — the router itself is often the long-term cause even after the immediate error clears. Consumer routers develop connection tracking table issues after weeks of continuous operation. Their DNS resolution performance also degrades as the table fills up. A weekly router restart (or configuring the router to restart automatically at 3am, a feature available on most modern routers) prevents the table-overflow issues that cause intermittent “This site can’t be reached” errors without any other apparent cause. If restarting the router fixes the issue each time but it keeps coming back, look at the router’s firmware update status — manufacturers release firmware updates specifically to address connection stability issues of this type.

When “This site can’t be reached” persists on a site for days despite fixing everything on your end, it’s worth accepting the possibility that the site itself is the problem. Web servers go offline for planned maintenance, unplanned outages, and sometimes permanently. Domain registrations lapse. Companies shut down their web presence. If a reliable site has been completely unreachable for 48+ hours across multiple networks and devices, it’s more likely a server-side permanent change than a fixable problem on your PC. Wayback Machine (web.archive.org) can sometimes show you a cached version of what the site contained, which at minimum confirms whether the URL is correct and the site genuinely used to exist.

IPv6 connectivity issues are an edge-case cause of “This site can’t be reached” that’s worth mentioning for completeness. When a site has both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses and Chrome attempts to connect via IPv6 first (as it’s designed to do), a broken or unstable IPv6 connection can cause the connection attempt to fail or time out — resulting in “This site can’t be reached” even though the IPv4 path to the site is completely fine. To test this, you can temporarily disable IPv6 on your network adapter: go to Network Connections, right-click your active adapter, Properties, and uncheck Internet Protocol Version 6 (TCP/IPv6). Test the failing site — if it loads, IPv6 is the issue. Contact your ISP or router manufacturer if IPv6 connectivity is consistently unstable. Most home routers and ISPs have addressed the major IPv6 reliability issues from earlier years, but it still occasionally causes “This site can’t be reached” in specific network configurations, particularly on ISPs that provide IPv6 via a tunnel (6to4 or Teredo) rather than native connectivity. If this sounds familiar, How to Fix ERR_NETWORK_CHANGED in Chrome is worth a look.