Avast interfering with Safari and Chrome after MAC waking?

[olyduck]

I have this bizarre issue where, after waking up my MAC, neither Safari or Chrome can access any websites.  Oddly, Firefox still can. Other clues include Avast scan running for 1 hour with “0%” completed.  When all these symptoms occur, my MAC will not respond to restart command, so I have to power off the machine.  Upon cold reboot, everything works again.

The problem seems to go away when I unintstall Avast (free version).   I reinstalled a fresh copy of Avast and the issue persists.  I’m not sure, but the issue seems to be since I upgraded to Catalina or perhaps to the latest version 10.15.2.  The other thing I have not tested yet is whether running both Avast and Malwarebytes at the same time is causing some issue.

Are there any other MAC users out there encountering this situation?

Thanks,
David

[ondrej.kolacek]

Hello,

we have few customers reporting this issue, however we were not able to reproduce this. We were told that for those for who this occurs, it tends to reoccur regularly, usually after reboot/sleep. Some reporters have Malwarebytes installed, but some do not. It also occurs on Catalina 10.15.1.

Please send us support package when this happens (https://support.avast.com/en-eu/article/Submit-Mac-Security-support-file). Also, to anyone who can induce this and is willing, please contact ondrej.kolacek@avast.com to schedule a remote access session with me to hopefully diagnose the issue. We really want to get to the bottom of this.

Unfortunately, at this moment, the only reliable way how to solve this seems to be to uninstall Avast and reboot.

We apologise for the issue.

Kind regards,
Ondrej Kolacek

[Graham103]

I had this exact same thing happening to me, frequently, as well as occasional freezes, where the mouse still worked but everything else was locked up (even the menu bar clock froze). For a long time I was blaming Apple, and I thought perhaps it was because my Mac Mini was a 2012 model and perhaps they hadn't tested as much on those (I like that year as it was the last year you could still add a second drive after purchase). Eventually, I got so frustrated I went and dropped a couple of grand on a new Mac Mini (as my father always told me, "cheap is expensive" - so much for "free" antivirus!). The freezing problem went away but the problem you describe continued. I finally had the bright idea of trying to remove Avast, and the problem has disappeared. Too late to return the Mac Mini now, so that was an expensive discovery. For now I also still have the old Mac Mini which has the issue.

[ondrej.kolacek]

Hello,

thanks for reporting this. Here is our current understanding of the problem (that only occurs on MacOS 10.15 Catalina):

we think that Apple has a bug in it’s filesystem code (probably something with Apple Filing Protocol, Apple’s network drive protocol, used for sharing files and doing time machine backups over local network, as most of the people affected have such drives). It seems that Avast File Shield being active dramatically increases the chance of the issue manifesting for a handful of users (we have a case where it seems the same issue has occurred without Avast even being installed…). The bug causes certain filesystem-related operations to freeze indefinitely; programs which freeze like this are not killable. Since when Safari or Apple Mail app open a page/email, they spawns a helper process which during it’s initialisation always freezes if the issue occurs; this is why the issue most often manifests as a browser problem; however other processes may freeze instead when trying to do similar operations as the helper process does during start, which can lead to various other issues and freezes. We had several people cooperate with us, but eventually the issue stopped occurring for them; even when using the Apple file sharing and backups on several test machines we are not able to reproduce the problem locally.

Please ensure that you are running the latest Catalina version.

Currently the only way how to work around this seems to be disabling Avast File Shield or uninstalling Avast.

What can be done: Apple engineers have asked us to provide them a diagnostic package from their sysdiagnose tool. Please if you can, keep a Terminal app running, and when the issue occurs, run command

Code: [Select]

sudo sysdiagnosein the terminal. This will require some interaction, output should be a file /var/tmp/sysdiagnose_some_other_stuff.tar.gz . I am however afraid that it is likely that the command will freeze. We were told that in that case it may be worth it to run this command immediately after the computer is restarted instead. Please send this file to ondrej.kolacek <at> avast.com together with info if it has been generated during the freeze or after the restart; we will analyse it and forward it to the Apple personnel.

We are currently rewriting Avast File Shield to use the new Apple’s Endpoint Security framework in a hope that this will stop us triggering the issue; however this will take a while yet.

We apologise for the issue and it's impact. We are doing all we can to solve the issue.

Kind Regards,
Ondrej Kolacek

[Graham103]

I have already sent Apple such diagnosis output, at their request, although I never heard anything from them afterwards.

I've switched to Sophos now and no longer have issues.

[sven120]

Of course Avast is without fault. Always blame someone else...
Uninstall Avast Security and problem is solved. I did that.

[bob3160]

Of course Avast is without fault. Always blame someone else...
Uninstall Avast Security and problem is solved. I did that.

That's always your option. It however doesn't solve the problem.

[guillaumelou]

Catalina is garbage there are too many problems with it !

[Jonas119]

Couldnt agree more :/

[EzequielF]

Same issue here at the moment installing Avast was the only way to work this out

[Alexander498]

I have this same issue. Not just Safari or Google Chrome are affected. Also, the Mail app doesn't render any message content, other apps can freeze as well but perhaps those who use any of the web components (just a guess).

These processes are visible in the terminal with this command (also on the attached screenshot):

Code: [Select]

ps auwwwxc | grep -si '?E'

You can't kill them and mac fails to reboot because it also fails to stop these processes. And I have to press and hold the power button eventually to get rid of that. This started a few years ago, I wasn't sure what causes this but now I'm confident – I uninstalled avast a few weeks ago and this issue didn't happen since that. I installed it back yesterday and had to reboot this morning.

I think there's something to do with the web shields and self-protection. I think thousands of users affected by this and the fact that the issue reported a year ago is still not resolved highlight the actual attitude towards the users.

P.S. Lol, I can't upload the screenshot, that's awesome! Here's the link https://ibb.co/LSG5t2k

[P15-D24]

I have the same issue, uninstall was the only solution so far.

[ondrej.kolacek]

Hello,

disabling File Shield should prevent the issue from occurring.

We have several possible solutions in queue and are working to test them/get them out ASAP.

We apologise for the issue.

Kind regards,
Ondrej Kolacek

[P15-D24]

We have several possible solutions in queue and are working to test them/get them out ASAP.
We apologize for the issue.
Kind regards,
Ondrej Kolacek


Any update on this issue?

[lag2120]

Hi, I would like to report the same issue (Firefox still working but Safari and Chrome don't) except that I uninstalled Avast free version from my Mac and it still hasn't resolved the issue. I also get an error message when I try to reinstall Avast to try the uninstall again - won't let me.

Please update on this issue, Avast has rendered my computer nearly useless.