Since the Yosemite upgrade to OS X, I have been facing lots of WiFi issues on my Mac. As I go from home, to cafe, to airport, to train, to cafe etc I notice that my connection just stops working. I kept blaming the public wifi routers until I realized that many times the issue is with OS X. This is not a comprehensive guide on how to fix WiFi issues on a Mac. But this one thing does work, so try it and good luck!
Launch “Terminal”
Now this may appear a little scary. But it’s quite easy. On every Mac, there’s a “command line interface” which lets you type instructions to your computer. This lets you do more advanced things that are not always possible by clicking with a mouse on buttons.
To do this,
- Press the “COMMAND” and ”SPACE” keys at the same time.
- This will open “Spotlight Search” in the middle of the screen.
- In that search box, type “Terminal” and hit “Enter/Return” to launch it
It will look something like this:
Find “discoveryd
Discoveryd is a tool introduced by Apple in Yosemite which is quite buggy and has been the main reason behind the issues. We won’t go into details but you first need to find it on your laptop. You do this by typing the following command in the terminal window:
ps -ax | grep discoveryd
Note that the vertical line is a “pipe”, the key above the return key.
This will show you all the processes running on your laptop with the name discoveryd. In the above example, on my laptop, it is the first result with an ID of 1169. Find the corresponding number on your laptop and note it.
Kill discoveryd
Now, all you have to do is “kill” discoveryd which will force it to start again and magically fix everything. You do this by typing:
sudo kill <process id number>
Sudo tells the terminal to run this command as an administrator. This may prompt you to type the password for your account. It’s safe to enter it here.
Replace 1169 with whatever was the number that you found in the previous step.
Conclusion
That’s it. This should fix the issue. If it doesn’t then you may have o resort to a more comprehensive troubleshooting guide.
