Ever since I upgraded to the latest version of Google Chrome, I keep getting “socket” errors when trying to open Google, Gmail or any other website under the google.com domain.

This isn’t as issue with my Internet connection as I can easily access the Google websites from IE and Firefox but they simply refuse to load inside Chrome with the following error:

Error 15 (net::ERR_SOCKET_NOT_CONNECTED): Unknown error.

The problem gets resolved when the computer is restarted but that’s just a temporary solution as the errors keep coming back. It turns out that this is a known issue in Google Chrome and has also been experienced by dozens of Google users on Twitter.

Fix Socket Errors in Google Chrome

While we wait for the Chrome team to fix the issue, the irony is that it only seems to affect Google websites, there’s one simple step you can perform to get rid of the socket errors without having to restart the computer.

Open Google Chrome and type chrome://net-internals in the address bar (omni box). Switch to the Sockets tab and choose Flush Socket Pools. Now open Gmail or Google.com in Chrome and the site should open without problems.

Also see: When you cannot open a specific website?