Regularly getting ERR_NETWORK_CHANGED errors in Chrome

What worked for me (though I am not sure why) was to disable IPv6.

I saw this issue with Chromium, Slack and Discord on Arch Linux. Poking around on the net made me check my network settings. I ran watch -n 2 'ip address' and saw inet6 flapping between link tentative and link noprefixroute. This made me wonder if some IPv6 configuration on my network was to blame, since mtr attempts would result in no route to host after a few seconds.

Sure enough, the following commands completely resolved the ERR_NETWORK_CHANGED issues, and various HTTP requests frequently failing in chrome, slack and discord.

sysctl -w net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6=1
sysctl -w net.ipv6.conf.default.disable_ipv6=1

If someone were to know why this worked, and what I should be checking into to actually solve this problem, I'd be grateful. I hadn't updated my Internet gateway or system in a long time before this issue began occurring. Maybe my ISP is to blame?

I stumbled upon this problem earlier today and learned that, for my situation, it had to do with the VPN software I was using on my Windows 8.1 laptop. Hopefully these potential solutions will help resolve the problem/point in the right direction for you or anyone else:

(it is important to note that these steps rely on your connection to the Internet working; ensure your access point/router is connected to the Internet by checking its status [blinking lights/directly connecting to the connectivity device and viewing its status page])

1. First we need to verify that our interfaces can function. If you have WiFi in addition to Ethernet, check both connections by opening Network and Sharing Center.

   • If one works:
     • Disable the working adapter
     • Enable the malfunctioning adapter
     • Ping the loopback address by opening command prompt:
       • Windows Key + X
       • select Command Prompt
       • Enter: ping 127.0.0.1
   • If you get replies from pinging the loopback address, you know that the malfunctioning interface is now functioning properly with layer three connectivity, therefore, if you wish, you can proceed to checking the settings of the working adapter and cross-referencing them with the misconfigured adapter to accurately diagnose and resolve the issue.
     • Microsoft can do this for you automatically if you click here!

2. When I viewed the properties of my interfaces in Network and Sharing Center, I realized the DNS settings I manually configured had been reconfigured from VPN software I had installed recently. I tried manually changing the DNS servers back for these adapters, but it hadn't resolved the problem. Upon inspection, I saw the TAP-WindowsAdapter that had been added to my system; my suspicion is the way that the third-party software had configured my network adapters to function together, which led me to this problem! I would like to know how the process of this software works, but for now I'm left feeling that DNS configuration was the source of the problem. I came to the conclusion that uninstalling this software may resolve the problem, and thus I came to my resolution. After re-installing this software I haven't run into this issue.

3. I read here, that the problem could be caused by privacy extensions for IPv6, which would disallow you to change your global IPv6 address. You can check the thread there for how to configure those settings and see if that resolves your issues.

For me the problem was the docker daemon! Once I stopped with:

sudo service docker stop

and stopped some containers I had running (likely bound to the local network with --net=host), when the docker daemon automatically restarted, I restarted again (which I have to do to switch to the nvidia runtime for some reason) -- the net::ERR_NETWORK_CHANGED errors in Chrome console went away.