The “DNS Server Not Responding” error means Chrome tried to translate a website address into an IP address and the DNS server either didn’t answer or gave an unusable response. Without that translation, Chrome has no idea where to send the request — the site simply can’t load, even if the internet connection itself is working perfectly. If you want the full context, see our Google Chrome Errors.
The most useful thing you can do before touching any settings: open Command Prompt and run ping 8.8.8.8. That sends a request directly to Google’s DNS server using its IP address, bypassing all DNS resolution entirely. If that ping gets replies, your internet connection is working — the problem is DNS specifically. If the ping also times out, the internet connection itself is down and you need to start with your router and ISP rather than DNS settings.
Three Fixes That Solve Most Cases
In the majority of DNS server not responding situations, one of these three things is the cause. Try them in order before anything more involved.
1. Restart the router. Power it off completely, wait 60 seconds, power it back on. Give it 2 minutes to fully reconnect. Consumer routers develop DNS relay and connection tracking issues after days of continuous operation — a power cycle clears them. This is the complete fix for a meaningful number of DNS errors that appear without any other changes being made.
2. Switch DNS servers. Your ISP’s DNS servers go down, lag, or return incorrect results without warning. Switching to Cloudflare (1.1.1.1) or Google (8.8.8.8) takes two minutes and permanently bypasses whatever your ISP’s servers are doing. Go to Settings → Network and internet → your active connection (Wi-Fi or Ethernet) → DNS server assignment → Edit → Manual → enter 1.1.1.1 as Preferred and 8.8.8.8 as Alternate → Save. Test immediately.
3. Flush the DNS cache. Both Windows and Chrome cache DNS lookups. When a cached entry goes stale or corrupt, Chrome keeps getting the bad result even if the underlying DNS server has recovered. Open Command Prompt as administrator and run ipconfig /flushdns. Then in Chrome, go to chrome://net-internals/#dns and click Clear host cache. Reload the page.
Check If It’s Chrome-Specific
Before spending time on system-level fixes, open the same site in Firefox or Edge. If other browsers load it fine while Chrome shows DNS Server Not Responding, the problem is Chrome’s own DNS configuration rather than the system-level DNS. Chrome has a built-in DNS-over-HTTPS feature that operates independently of Windows DNS settings — and it can conflict with certain network configurations.
To check: Chrome Settings → Privacy and security → Security → scroll to Use secure DNS. Try toggling it off temporarily. If the DNS error resolves in Chrome, the DoH provider was conflicting with your network. You can either leave DoH off or change the provider to Cloudflare or Google from the dropdown. This is a particularly common cause after Chrome updates that quietly change the DoH provider, and on corporate networks where the DNS infrastructure handles filtering and the external DoH provider bypasses those filters.
If the Error Affects All Browsers and Devices
DNS Server Not Responding appearing across every browser, on every device in the household simultaneously, points to the router or ISP rather than anything on your specific machine. At this scale, the DNS Client service on your PC isn’t the issue — the problem is upstream.
After the router restart (which remains the first step), check your router’s admin panel for DNS configuration. Most consumer routers let you set the DNS server used for the whole network. If it’s currently set to your ISP’s DNS addresses, try changing it to 1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8 at the router level — this applies the fix to all devices on the network at once rather than configuring each device individually.
If the DNS error is affecting all devices and persists after router restart and DNS changes, the ISP’s DNS infrastructure itself may be having an outage. Check the ISP’s service status page or social media for outage reports. These outages are usually resolved within a few hours. Switching to 1.1.1.1 at the router level bypasses the ISP’s DNS entirely and is the most effective workaround while the ISP sorts their infrastructure.
Windows DNS Client Service
If the error appeared suddenly on one machine while others on the same network work fine, the Windows DNS Client service may have stopped. This happens more often than it should after Windows updates. The DNS Client service (also called “dnscache”) handles all DNS resolution for the system — when it stops, every DNS lookup fails.
- Press Windows + R, type services.msc, press Enter
- Find DNS Client in the list
- Right-click → Restart
- Check that Properties → Startup type is set to Automatic
- Test Chrome immediately
On Windows 11, this service may appear as protected and the Restart option may be greyed out — in that case a full PC restart restarts the service correctly. If the service keeps stopping, check Windows Update history for recent updates that may have changed the service configuration.
VPN and Antivirus DNS Interference
VPN applications take over DNS routing to prevent leaks. When the VPN’s DNS server is unavailable, every lookup fails with a not responding error in Chrome — and the symptom is indistinguishable from an ISP DNS failure unless you test with the VPN disconnected. If a VPN is installed and active, disconnect it completely (quit the application, don’t just toggle the tunnel off) and test Chrome.
Antivirus products with DNS filtering or web protection features work similarly — they intercept DNS queries and route them through their own servers for malware checking. When those servers have issues, DNS Server Not Responding appears. Temporarily disabling web protection in the antivirus confirms this quickly. If disabling it fixes the error, add Chrome to the antivirus whitelist rather than leaving protection off permanently.
Full Network Stack Reset — Last Resort
For DNS errors that persist after switching DNS servers, flushing cache, restarting services, and checking VPN/antivirus, the Windows network stack itself has accumulated corruption. This is more common on machines that have had multiple VPN clients, antivirus products, and network tools installed and removed over time. Each leaves traces in the network stack, and the accumulated effect eventually breaks DNS resolution even when individual components appear healthy.
netsh winsock reset
netsh int ip reset
ipconfig /release
ipconfig /flushdns
ipconfig /renewRun these in sequence in an Administrator Command Prompt, then restart the PC. The Winsock reset requires a restart to take effect. After restarting, test Chrome. This resolves the “nothing else worked” category of DNS server not responding errors in the large majority of cases.
When the Problem Is Genuinely on the Site’s End
Sometimes DNS Server Not Responding is accurate — the site’s DNS is misconfigured, the domain has expired, or the site’s DNS provider is having an outage. If the error appears only on one specific site while everything else loads fine, and it reproduces on multiple devices and networks, the site itself is the problem. A WHOIS lookup on the domain confirms whether the domain registration is still active. DNS lookup tools (search “DNS lookup [domain]”) show whether the domain has valid DNS records pointing anywhere. If the domain has no records, the site owner needs to fix their DNS configuration.
Our guide on ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED in Chrome covers the specific Chrome error code that accompanies DNS Server Not Responding, with additional detail on Chrome-specific DNS configuration. For DNS failures that affect all browsers simultaneously, the fixes in this guide cover that scenario comprehensively. The Google Chrome help documentation includes additional DNS troubleshooting for enterprise environments with internal DNS zones and split-horizon DNS configurations.
IPv6 and DNS Server Not Responding have a specific relationship worth knowing about. Chrome, like modern operating systems, prefers IPv6 connections when available. If your network provides IPv6 addressing but the IPv6 DNS resolution path is broken — which happens more often than you’d expect on home networks with partially configured IPv6 — Chrome may try to resolve domains via IPv6 DNS and get no response, while the IPv4 DNS path works fine. The symptom is DNS Server Not Responding even though the network appears fully functional. Testing whether disabling IPv6 on the network adapter resolves the error (Network Connections → right-click adapter → Properties → uncheck Internet Protocol Version 6 → OK) quickly confirms this. If it does, the IPv6 configuration on your network or router needs attention — either correct it or leave IPv6 disabled on the adapter if you don’t specifically need it.
Public DNS resolvers perform differently by geographic location. Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 is consistently fast globally, but for users in specific regions — some parts of Asia and Africa particularly — Google’s 8.8.8.8 or regional alternatives like OpenDNS (208.67.222.222) may provide faster and more reliable responses. If switching to 1.1.1.1 reduces the frequency of DNS Server Not Responding but doesn’t eliminate it, trying a different public resolver that has better infrastructure in your region may help further. The DNSPerf website benchmarks public DNS resolver performance by region if you want data on which is fastest from your location.
Router DNS relay problems produce DNS Server Not Responding in a specific pattern: the error affects all devices on the network, resolves after restarting the router, but returns after hours or days. This “works then fails again” pattern is characteristic of the router’s DNS relay service or connection tracking table filling up and needing to be cleared. Routers that are left running for months without restart accumulate these issues. Scheduling a weekly router restart (configurable in most modern router admin panels as an automatic scheduled restart, usually at 3-4am) prevents this accumulation and reduces the frequency of DNS-related errors across all devices on the network. If weekly restarts eliminate the recurring DNS Server Not Responding on all devices, the router is confirmed as the cause and its firmware update status is worth checking — manufacturers release firmware updates specifically addressing DNS relay stability issues.
Corporate remote work setups add specific DNS complications. When employees connect to a corporate VPN, DNS queries typically get routed through the corporate DNS server so that internal company resources are resolvable. But when the VPN is not connected, those internal DNS addresses become unreachable — and if Chrome cached them, DNS Server Not Responding appears for those internal resources until the cache expires or the VPN is reconnected. This is expected behaviour rather than an error per se, but it causes confusion when switching between home and office network modes. Flushing Chrome’s DNS cache (chrome://net-internals/#dns → Clear host cache) after connecting or disconnecting from a corporate VPN prevents the stale internal DNS entries from causing errors after the network configuration changes.
Secondary DNS server configuration is worth double-checking even after you’ve set up custom DNS. Most DNS configuration interfaces ask for a preferred (primary) and alternate (secondary) DNS server. If only the primary is configured and it goes down, the system should automatically fall back to the secondary — but this only works if the secondary is actually set. Many home users who configured a single DNS server years ago find they have no fallback when their chosen primary has an outage. Setting both 1.1.1.1 (primary) and 8.8.8.8 (secondary) means that if Cloudflare has an issue, Google’s DNS picks up the queries automatically without any visible interruption.
DNS Server Not Responding on HTTPS sites specifically — while HTTP sites still load — points to a different cause: the DNS-over-HTTPS configuration in Chrome is resolving standard DNS queries fine but failing on DoH queries. Since Chrome uses DoH for HTTPS sites by default when DoH is enabled, and standard DNS for some other queries, a broken DoH configuration produces exactly this pattern. Disabling DoH in Chrome Settings → Privacy and security → Security → Use secure DNS and testing whether HTTPS sites now resolve confirms this. If they do, the DoH provider has an issue and switching to standard DNS (with DoH disabled) or switching the DoH provider resolves it. If this sounds familiar, DNS Server Not Responding is worth a look.
Checking Windows’ own DNS diagnostic tool can save time for stubborn cases. In an elevated PowerShell window, running Resolve-DnsName google.com shows whether Windows can resolve a domain successfully and which DNS server handled the query. If this command fails with an error while you expect it to work, Windows-level DNS resolution is broken independent of Chrome. If it succeeds but Chrome still shows DNS Server Not Responding, the problem is Chrome-specific — its DoH setting, an extension, or its internal DNS cache. This five-second test quickly identifies which layer is broken without working through all possible fixes experimentally. Our guide on DNS Server Not Responding covers an adjacent issue.
