No Internet globe symbol

[Sheridan]

Have MS changed something that's brought that stupid 'no internet' globe symbol back? Its started to appear on just about all of our wireless devices

 

They work fine, but we get calls saying there's no connection (even though it will work as normal when they try)

 

Its such a useless thing to have on a domain, but I'm not sure why its suddenly come back?

[MisterTechMan]

Has anything on your filtering changed?

 

MS use msftncsi.com and msftconnecttest.com to check connectivity, could it be something is blocking these and falsely reporting that it has no connectivity?

[Sheridan]

Nothing's changed, I can see traffic on our smoothwall hitting msftconnecttest and msftncsi.com as unauthenticated, and also its allowed on our firewall

 

Its not consistent either, its affecting all of the wireless devices but not all the time - sometimes toggling the wifi on and off will resolve it but it varies

[Sheridan]

Hmm, this may be something wrong with our wifi. I've noticed anyone signing in over wifi now doesn't get signed in 365 automatically (either local apps or web) so something has broken on our wireless

 

Odd thing is they can sign in manually OK, but this should be automatic when they open Word etc - worked last week so not sure if this is update related or something else

[Rob_D]

For us, rebooting the smoothwall seems to have fixed the problem.

[Sheridan]

Is that for the globe issue, or signing into 365? I know the smoothwall updated fairly recently

[Rob_D]

We'd been having the globe issues and some odd sign-in things with MS and Adobe. Rebooting seems to have fixed all of them.

[mikes]

Interestingly I had this with Windows 10 wired clients - they all showed the no globe, o365/adobe would refuse to sign in citing no internet etc. It came out of nowhere and I blamed our LEA ran firewall or switches as I couldn't find any other cause, as I could get to all the MSFT test websites etc. Even the reg keys to turn off the tests didn't work - all it did was change the globe icon back into a network icon but it still said No Internet and o365 still wouldn't work.

 

I had to disable IPV4 Checksum Offloading 1 by 1 on the network cards of every desktop to fix the problem.

 

But we've just bought new computers and I've imaged them with Win 11 and they detect Internet fine, so who knows what that was all about. I still see the odd wireless laptop say No Internet but it seems to go away after a minute or two on those (the wired ones stayed forever No Internet)

[Sheridan]

We're only seeing this on wifi devices. Its variable as well - but our 365 single sign on isn't working for them either - but only over wifi!

 

So if I test a laptop and login as any account (staff,admin,student) and open Word - it asks the user to sign in - which then works ok. However if I connect the laptop to a standard network port and do exactly the same login, it single signs in to 365 as expected!

 

If I then login to the same laptop over wifi again, it works as expected, so its almost like the first run over wifi only isn't triggering the sso connection. Very odd and seems to have coincided with the daft globe reappearance!

[Sheridan]

Rebooted our smoothie and it made no difference unfortunately. Its a shame we can't just disable this dog of a feature as it seems to break SSO into 365 if it thinks there's not internet, even when there is!

[Rob_D]

It's a bit of a cludge, but you could use your DNS to re-point the wireless devices to local versions of http://www.msftncsi.com/ncsi.txt and http://www.msftconnecttest.com/connecttest.txt

If it's a timeout/latency issue on the wireless, then it might help/

[NetworkServices]

If it's just Windows 11 WiFi clients try disabling Credential Guard. There is a gpo for it (although I can't see it for looking at the moment). I had the same problem and disabling this solved it.

 

EDIT: I think it was called 'Turn on Virtualization Based Security'. This was the one I disabled.

Edited March 5, 2025 by NetworkServices

[Sheridan]

We already have Credential Guard disabled to get our wifi working (will get around to making this cert based at some point!)

 

It definitely seems wifi based as plugging in a wifi device into the lan there's no issues at all.

[mikes]

yeah we had the opposite - disabling IPV4 checksum offload on our LAN cards advanced properties fixed it for us, had to do it 1 by 1 - but unfortunately I don't see this option on our machines wifi NIC's so not sure if it will help you

[Sheridan]

Interestingly I tried using the corporate options and it still does the same - when I run the troubleshooter it came up with the following error

 

'The device or resource (smoothwall.domain.local) is not set up to accept communications on port 'The World Wide Web Service (HTTP)'

 

Which is odd it has full connectivity via the smoothwall, and it seems like its ignoring the corporate options as well

 

I wish this could just be removed, its utterly useless in a work enviroment!

[Davit2005]

Interestingly I tried using the corporate options and it still does the same - when I run the troubleshooter it came up with the following error

 

'The device or resource (smoothwall.domain.local) is not set up to accept communications on port 'The World Wide Web Service (HTTP)'

 

Which is odd it has full connectivity via the smoothwall, and it seems like its ignoring the corporate options as well

 

I wish this could just be removed, its utterly useless in a work enviroment!

 

Personally I'd like to kick that globe icon off the f****** Globe. The old icons were much more informative i.e. exclamation mark or red cross. And it seems these days with each new version Windows puts one more click between the user and the actual information they want to troubleshoot issues or get basic information unless you know the cli command or can search in the search box i.e. compmgmt.msc or diskmgmt.msc .

Edited March 6, 2025 by Davit2005

[mikes]

Yeah MS have been doing this since at least Vista. I actually quit a job half due to Vista - XP with dialup would give specific error codes for specific errors e.g. Error 691 would be an invalid U/P, a different code for no dial tone. So a user could phone up "I have Error 691" and we'd know straight away. MS thought it would be a great idea to replace this with a generic "We could not connect to the Internet" and then offer a troubleshooter that of course would never work if there was no dial tone or an invalid U/P - and even at the end of this troubleshooter you'd still not know the error code.

So it went from a simple call a lot of the times to being an absolute nightmare getting customers over the phone to check leads, passwords, customers getting more frustrated, I was already sick of the place and this new OS making things 10 times harder just pushed me over the edge.

So they've been doing it for years

 

But of course MS design their OS for their benefit not ours, they don't care about our usability, that's why we have to put in place all these reg hacks and scripts and why more places are choosing to not even bother with MS software at all. I'm on Windows 10 and randomly without pushing out a WSUS update I noticed my computer now randomly chooses pretty desktop backgrounds - not a problem but of course they have to have a "more info" button so they can sell you holidays.

 

And last night I fell asleep to a Youtube stream, and was woken up nicely at 3am by an MS toast notification saying they recommend I try out some new video game! I thought for a moment I was infected with adware until of course I realised, no, MS are more concerned with pushing ads than making their OS usable.

 

This "Internet Check" wouldn't be a huge bother if it worked - how hard can it be for MS to make their OS ping an external site? and for it to be reliable?

This is why I always say in work over and over "bear in mind it is Microsoft software so you can never be 100% sure you can rely on it for anything"

[Hoyt]

Again y'all have gotten my interest. We have had the globe indicating no Internet connection on Windows 10 PCs for years (still don't have any Win 11 units deployed yet). The only problem it really seems to cause us is clip art in Microsoft Office isn't available. Everything else works fine. It's been completely random too. You can reboot a lab of PCs several times and get different units showing the globe after a while.

 

When I get some time I'll try to disable IPv4 Checksum Offload to see if it helps. I don't think we've gotten any complaints on wireless devices, but then again only administrators have Windows laptops, all others are Chromebooks.