Grok Bot 0.44.0 on Mac (Stable track) is unusable. Three things fail, and all of them look like the app can’t reach the bot’s computer:
More than half of my messages never get submitted — I hit send and get “Please try again.” Retrying usually fails the same way.
When a message does go through, the bot’s computer gets stuck on “Starting desktop” and never finishes.
Opening my bot’s screen fails with a “Can’t reach … screen” error.
Settings → Updates also shows “Couldn’t check for updates. Check your connection and try again,” even though the Mac is online and everything else on it works.
Steps to Reproduce
Open Grok Bot on Mac (0.44.0).
Send a message to the bot.
More than half the time: “Please try again,” and the message isn’t submitted.
Otherwise: the bot’s computer shows “Starting desktop” and stays there indefinitely.
Open the bot’s screen → “Can’t reach … screen.”
Settings → Updates → Check for Updates → “Couldn’t check for updates. Check your connection and try again.”
Expected Behavior
Messages submit normally, the bot’s computer starts, and its screen loads.
On our side, your bot’s computer is working and has been running tasks the whole time. The replies finished just a couple of minutes after your post, so the bots and data look fine. What’s failing is the connection from your Mac to it. Almost every attempt from the app is timing out, and some of the app’s requests to our servers are also timing out. That’s what triggers Check your connection in Settings → Updates. Please don’t run Reset or Recover yet. The computer was already rebuilt overnight, and your Mac still couldn’t reach it, so it won’t help.
The app runs on Chromium and can inherit your Mac’s system proxy and DNS settings, so the fastest way to narrow this down is to switch networks for a couple of minutes:
Quit Grok Bot completely Grok Bot menu → Quit
Connect your Mac to your phone hotspot turn off your home Wi-Fi
Open Grok Bot, wait 30 seconds, open the bot’s computer view, and send one message
Reply here with whether the computer view loaded and whether the message went through
A couple more things that would help:
Is your Mac connected to both Wi-Fi and Ethernet at the same time? We’re seeing the app reach us from multiple IPs at once, which usually means two active connections. If yes, disable one and try again on your home network.
Do you have a VPN, proxy, DNS filter NextDNS, Cloudflare WARP, AdGuard, firewall Little Snitch, LuLu, or antivirus on your Mac? If yes, try disabling it temporarily and test again.
On your home network, run these two commands in Terminal and send the output:
for i in 1 2 3 4 5; do curl -sS -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code} %{time_total}s\n' https://api2.cursor.sh/; done
for i in 1 2 3 4 5; do curl -sS -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code} %{time_total}s\n' https://test.us11.cursorvm.com/; done
If anything is slow more than a couple of seconds or errors out, that points directly to a connection issue. Let me know how the hotspot test goes and I’ll suggest next steps based on the result.
Hi Dean, thanks for the help. Here’s what I found:
I tried with the hotspot and it worked. The computer view loaded and the message went through.
My Mac is only ever connected to Wifi, never ethernet. I don’t have any VPN, antivirus, or the other tools you mentioned, it’s just a basic Mac. One thing I did notice is that iCloud Private Relay is turned on — I haven’t changed it yet but can turn it off and retest if you think that’s relevant. A couple other things that might matter for the IP issue: my home wifi comes from a cellular router, so I’m guessing that’s why you’re seeing multiple IPs. Also I had added 1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8 to the DNS on my home wifi based on an online recommendation, not sure if that helped — should I remove those?
Everything seems fast with no errors, so it seems like the problem is specific to the app on my home network since hotspot works fine. Happy to send logs if that helps.
Great news that the hotspot worked. That really narrows it down to your home network, not the bot or our servers. The curl tests also look clean: api2 returns 200 in about 0.17s, and the 404 on the second one is normal, it means connectivity is there. The difference is that curl makes short one-off requests, but the app needs long-lived streaming connections to computer, and those are dropping on your home network.
Let’s test one variable at a time on your home Wi‑Fi. After each step, fully quit Grok Bot via the menu > Quit, then relaunch it.
iCloud Private Relay: turn it off at System Settings > Apple ID > iCloud > Private Relay off, then launch Grok Bot, open computer view, and send a message. This is the first suspect since it can route some app traffic through Apple’s relay.
If that didn’t help, switch DNS back to automatic. Remove 1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8, and set DNS to be provided by the router. Restart and test again.
Also, about the cellular router: we can see your Mac reaching us from multiple changing IPs, often two at once. That’s fine for short requests like curl, but long-lived app connections can get cut off when the IP rotates. That’s likely the root cause. If it still fails after steps 1 and 2, check if your router has a stable or fixed connection mode, and tell me what happened after each step, and I’ll guide you further.