Anyone who owns a MacBook Neo, MacBook Pro or iMac i it rarely restarts, and only puts the computer to sleepoften notices after a few weeks that your device slows down and some apps stop working as expected. Photon engineers discovered a bug that works like a time bomb and is probably responsible for some of these problems.
From this point on many applications and functions stop working properly:
- open applications cannot connect to the server (time_out)
- Internet browsing stops working
- network and cloud services stop working
- email doesn't work
- They are not checking for updates
- SSH protocol does not work
Apple MacOS – a time bomb
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But before that established network connections still work no problem, there are no error messagesand macOS correctly responds to ping. This gives the impression that everything is working properly, so diagnosing the problem is very difficult.
Binary reason
This error causes exactly 49 days, 17 hours, 2 minutes and 47.296 seconds after turning on the computer Mother, network connections (including local ones) do not close properly.
This time interval is not arbitrary because macOS uses a 32-bit counter to determine the time and duration of network connections. This counter can store values up to 2³², which corresponds to 4,294,967,295 milliseconds, or 49 days, 17 hours, 2 minutes, and 47.296 seconds. When this value is exceeded the counter simply stops working.
Apple MacOS – time bomb – TCP
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This initially leads to a gradually increased CPU loadbecause after some time, hundreds or even thousands of connections are being handled that should have been closed a long time ago, but are still open because the timer has stopped. However, when the available ports are exhausted (usually 16,384 ports in macOS), no new connections can be made anymore.
Apple MacOS – time bomb – ports
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For this similar reason, Windows 95 and Windows 98 crashed after 49.7 days, and some Linux distributions track seconds since January 1, 1970, using a 32-bit counter that may crash on January 19, 2038. More details about this bug can be found in Photon's detailed report.
A trivial solution
In this case, the simplest solution is… restart your computer. This resets the countdown, solving the problem for exactly 49 days until it occurs again. It is also good practice periodic restart of the deviceso that the problem does not have the opportunity to occur and waiting for Apple to release the appropriate update.
It should be noted that this is explicit a bug, not an intentional slowdown of devicesas was the case with the batterygate scandal in 2017, when it was discovered that Apple was intentionally slowing down older iPhones. At that time, the fraud was so bold and the manufacturer's explanations were so naive that even iPhone users felt cheated and realized that Apple was making idiots of them. For which, by court decision, Apple had to pay compensation to users.
