According to Photon, the current mitigation is a reboot, although the team says it's working on an alternative solution. They also found this issue to be the source of some bugs discussed online in the Apple Community forums, too. The long-existing RFC 7323 specifies what should happen to the timestamp clock (tcp_now) when it reaches its limit, but Apple's kernel performs an incorrect implementation. It's safe to say this issue will likely be fixed quickly—and hopefully before 49.7 days after the report.
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Bruno Ferreira is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware. He has decades of experience with PC hardware and assorted sundries, alongside a career as a developer. He's obsessed with detail and has a tendency to ramble on the topics he loves. When not doing that, he's usually playing games, or at live music shows and festivals. ","collapsible":{"enabled":true,"maxHeight":250,"readMoreText":"Read more","readLessText":"Read less"}}), "https://slice.vanilla.futurecdn.net/13-4-20/js/authorBio.js"); } else { console.error('%c FTE ','background: #9306F9; color: #ffffff','no lazy slice hydration function available'); } Bruno Ferreira Social Links Navigation Contributor Bruno Ferreira is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware. He has decades of experience with PC hardware and assorted sundries, alongside a career as a developer. He's obsessed with detail and has a tendency to ramble on the topics he loves. When not doing that, he's usually playing games, or at live music shows and festivals.
JamesJones44 I'm not so sure I agree with their analysis, at least not 100%. I have a 2018 Mac Mini running as a reverse proxy for a VPN that never gets rebooted. In fact the last time it was rebooted was December 15th when I upgraded it to macOS 26. It has been running and serving the reverse proxy for 113 days. Perhaps this only affects a subset of macOS hardware, but Photon is claiming any Mac which my 2018 Mac Mini seems to disprove. Reply
CelicaGT I never reboot my Macs, excepting for updates. What is the author doing to require a reboot every few weeks? This isn't Windows '98… Reply
Rhongomiant I have definitely seen issues like like what is described here, but unfortunately they are not limited to this 49 day issue. I haven’t tracked uptime days when these issues have occurred, but currently I have an issue where the screen share session from a MBP 16” M3 to a MBA 15” M4 drops and reconnects at ~10 minutes of use or less. This started yesterday. The day before and every day before that was fine. The MBP has been up for 16.7 days and the MBA has been up for 7.5 days. I operate hundreds of Linux servers since 2008 and have had to reboot servers less than I have had to reboot my Macs for issues like this. I haven’t used Windows on the regular since 2015 and never experienced this issue and haven’t heard of people that use it having like issues then or now. I didn’t have these issues until I got an M series Mac. My MBP 2019 didn’t have it when I used it regularly, so it must be something or things that have been added or updated in more recent versions of macOS and maybe with specific hardware at either the hardware or code level, Intel code vs Arm code. Reply
PEnns From the article, it seems this issue is confined to Photon and its "fleet of Macs'" (somebody correct me if I am wrong). My take on this: ANY disgruntled 3rd rate coder / administrator can write a Date() based routine that will cause issues say, starting every 49 days after they have been let go…. If my theory = True, they're lucky their data doesn't get erased after an X amount of days and repeats till the real reason is found! Reply
palladin9479 CelicaGT said: I never reboot my Macs, excepting for updates. What is the author doing to require a reboot every few weeks? This isn't Windows '98… It's in the toms article but goes deeper when you read the linked Photon article https://photon.codes/blog/we-found-a-ticking-time-bomb-in-macos-tcp-networking "The bug we found in macOS belongs to this exact family. The XNU kernel stores its TCP timestamp as a uint32_t counting milliseconds since boot. 2³² milliseconds = 49 days, 17 hours, 2 minutes, and 47.296 seconds . After that, the counter wraps back to zero. What happens next is the subject of this post." They wrote some test code and observed and yes the MacOS kernel, at the articles time of writing, had a bug with the networking stack that can cause the TCP stack connection cleanup to break when the TCP timestamp value roles over the 32-bit counter. This is the decisive evidence. macOS TIME_WAIT timeout is 2 \00d7 MSL = 30 seconds. 84 seconds after the script stopped, all 2,828 TIME_WAIT connections should have expired to zero . Instead, not a single one was reclaimed — the count actually increased slightly as the system's own normal connections also began piling up. You can only have so many TCP connections open at once so once cleanup stops working it's merely a matter of time until you hit that limit and no more new TCP connections can be made. They even go into exactly where in the kernel code the bug is at. Reply
JamesJones44 PEnns said: From the article, it seems this issue is confined to Photon and its "fleet of Macs'" (somebody correct me if I am wrong). I feel like it has to be, there are several Mac hosting services out there (Mac Stadium for example), I find it hard to believe no other service has seen this. Reading the source article, it sounds like it has more to due with the number of connections + time vs just a raw 49.7 days. A low number of connections sounds like it wouldn't be an issue for a very long time, but rapid connections causes the issue. I could be wrong, but that is how I've read it. I'm still have my suspicions of the analysis as a whole (no doubt they found something, but is it really the problem or is it they way they are interacting with the system), seems like we would have heard of this before now, but at least the added number of connections variable makes it more plausible Reply
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- https://www.tomshardware.com/software/macos/macos-has-a-49-7-day-networking-time-bomb-built-in-that-only-a-reboot-fixes-comparison-operation-on-unreliable-time-value-stops-machines-dead-in-their-tracks#main
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