ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED is Chrome telling you it could not convert a hostname into an IP address. Nothing was sent to the site — there was no address to send it to. That single fact rules out most of what people assume: the server cannot be overloaded, blocking you, or misconfigured, because your browser never reached it.
What actually failed ¶
Every request starts with a DNS lookup. Your machine asks a resolver — your ISP's, your router's, or one you configured — for the address behind the name. ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED means that question got no usable answer, either because the resolver said the name does not exist, or because the resolver could not be reached at all.
It is Chrome's wording for the same underlying condition as DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN; which of the two you see depends on which stage of Chrome's lookup gave up.
Is it you, or the domain? ¶
This is the only question worth answering first, and it takes seconds. Look the domain up from outside your network with our DNS lookup:
- Records come back — the domain is fine and your resolver is the problem. Work through the fixes below.
- No records anywhere — the domain genuinely does not resolve. Either it is misspelled, it expired, or its DNS is broken at the registrar. Nothing on your machine will fix that.
Six fixes, in the order worth trying ¶
- Check the spelling. Unglamorous and frequently correct, especially with a hyphen or a country TLD.
- Flush the DNS cache. A stale negative cache entry survives the problem that created it — the exact commands per OS, and remember Chrome keeps its own cache at
chrome://net-internals/#dns. - Try a different resolver. Switching to 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 immediately proves whether your ISP's resolver is the fault. If the site loads afterwards, it was.
- Restart the router. Home routers cache DNS and some do it badly, holding failures long past their TTL.
- Disable VPN, proxy, or DNS filtering temporarily. Pi-hole, NextDNS and corporate filters all produce this error for blocked domains — which is them working as configured, not a fault.
- Test on mobile data. The fastest way to separate "my network" from "the internet". If it resolves on cellular and not on Wi-Fi, the answer is upstream of your router.
If it is a domain you own ¶
Check the registrar first: an expired registration removes the nameserver delegation and every lookup fails instantly. After that, confirm the nameservers at the registrar match the ones actually serving your zone — a mismatch after a DNS migration is the second most common cause, and propagation means the two can disagree for hours.
When it is intermittent ¶
An error that comes and goes is a different problem from one that persists, and it is usually one of two things. Either a resolver in a pool is broken while its siblings work — so the answer depends on which one you happen to hit — or the domain's nameservers disagree with each other, typically mid-migration, and you get whichever one answered first.
A quick way to tell them apart: if the failure follows the device, the resolver is the suspect. If it follows the domain across devices and networks, the domain's DNS is mid-change and time is the fix.
FAQ ¶
Does ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED mean the website is down?
Not usually. It means the name did not resolve for you. A site with a genuine outage still resolves — you would reach it and get an error, or a timeout, instead. If a lookup from outside your network returns records, the site is very likely fine.
Why does it work on my phone but not my laptop?
Different resolvers, different caches. Your phone on cellular uses the carrier's; your laptop uses your router's or your ISP's. That gap is the diagnosis: the problem is on the laptop's path.
What is the difference between this and NXDOMAIN?
Practically none for a user — both mean the name did not resolve. NXDOMAIN is specifically the authoritative answer "this name does not exist"; ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED also covers cases where the resolver simply could not be reached.