Why does my WiFi say connected but there is no internet?
The message is telling you something precise and useful: your device successfully joined the local wireless network, but traffic is not reaching the wider internet. That splits the problem cleanly in two, and the split is what makes it quick to diagnose. Everything between your device and the router is working. Something between the router and your provider, or in name resolution, is not.
Work outward from the device.
- Check whether other devices on the same network have the same problem. If they do, the fault is the router or the connection beyond it. If only one device is affected, the fault is on that device, usually its address configuration or a misbehaving VPN or proxy setting.
- Look at the router status lights or admin page. Most routers distinguish between the local network and the internet connection, and an unlit or red internet indicator points directly at the link to your provider.
- Consider name resolution separately. If addresses work but names do not, the network is fine and the resolver is failing. Switching to a well known public resolver temporarily confirms this in seconds.
The common underlying causes are a provider outage, a connection that requires re-authentication after a reset, a lease that failed to renew, or a router that has been running long enough to exhaust memory. That last one is the reason restarting the router genuinely does help so often; it is not superstition, it clears accumulated state.
If the router itself shows a healthy internet connection and a single device still fails, resetting that device network settings resolves most remaining cases, since it clears stale address and resolver configuration.