Experts uncover a 49-day time bomb that is likely slowing down your Mac

If your Mac has been running for weeks without a restart and it feels sluggish, there is a very specific reason for that. Researchers at Photon have uncovered a macOS bug that functions exactly like a ticking time bomb.

After 49 days, 17 hours, 2 minutes, and 47 seconds of continuous uptime, your Mac quietly loses the ability to establish new internet connections. Apps stop working, websites fail to load, and your CPU starts working significantly harder than it should.

So what exactly is happening inside your Mac?

The bug lives in how macOS tracks time for managing network connections. The operating system uses a 32-bit counter, which can hold values up to 4,294,967,295 milliseconds. That ceiling corresponds precisely to 49.7 days of continuous runtime.

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Once that number is hit, the counter overflows and rolls

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