Cannot Open Google or Gmail in Chrome? Try this fix

Ever since I upgraded to the latest version of Google Chrome, I keep getting “socket” errors when trying to open Google, Gmail or any other website under the google.com domain.

This isn’t as issue with my Internet connection as I can easily access the Google websites from IE and Firefox but they simply refuse to load inside Chrome with the following error:

Google Chrome - Socket Error Error 15 (net::ERR_SOCKET_NOT_CONNECTED): Unknown error.

The problem gets resolved when the computer is restarted but that’s just a temporary solution as the errors keep coming back. It turns out that this is a known issue in Google Chrome and has also been experienced by dozens of Google users on Twitter.

Fix Socket Errors in Google Chrome

While we wait for the Chrome team to fix the issue, the irony is that it only seems to affect Google websites, there’s one simple step you can perform to get rid of the socket errors without having to restart the computer.

Open Google Chrome and type chrome://net-internals in the address bar (omni box). Switch to the Sockets tab and choose Flush Socket Pools. Now open Gmail or Google.com in Chrome and the site should open without problems.

Also see: When you cannot open a specific website?

Amit Agarwal

Amit Agarwal

Google Developer Expert, Google Cloud Champion

Amit Agarwal is a Google Developer Expert in Google Workspace and Google Apps Script. He holds an engineering degree in Computer Science (I.I.T.) and is the first professional blogger in India.

Amit has developed several popular Google add-ons including Mail Merge for Gmail and Document Studio. Read more on Lifehacker and YourStory

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