Fix macOS Sonoma Wi-Fi Disconnects After Sleep

Wi-Fi keeps dropping after sleep on macOS Sonoma? Here's the real fix, from a quick 30-second toggle to advanced power management tweaks that actually stick.

You close the lid, come back an hour later, and your MacBook is staring at you with that annoying 'Your computer is not connected to the internet' banner. The Wi-Fi icon shows full bars. Sometimes it even says it's connected to your network. But nothing loads.

This isn't a hardware failure. It's a power management bug in macOS Sonoma (14.x) that hits certain Wi-Fi chipsets — mostly Broadcom BCM43xx on Intel Macs, but also some Apple Silicon M1/M2 units after the 14.2 and 14.4 updates. The culprit here is almost always the airportd daemon not renegotiating DHCP or 802.11 power save state when the machine wakes from sleep.

I've fixed this on dozens of machines. Work through the steps in order. Stop as soon as it sticks.

Step 1: The 30-Second Fix — Toggle Wi-Fi Off and On

Yeah, it's obvious. Do it anyway.

Click the Wi-Fi icon in the menu bar.
Turn Wi-Fi off.
Wait 10 seconds.
Turn it back on and reconnect.

If that fixes it, the problem is airportd losing its power save state on wake. It'll come back. Keep reading.

Don't bother with 'Renew DHCP Lease' in System Settings → Network → Wi-Fi → Details → TCP/IP. It helps sometimes, but on Sonoma it's a coin flip. The real issue is upstream of DHCP.

Step 2: The 5-Minute Fix — Nuke the Wi-Fi Preferences

This clears corrupted network plists that Sonoma sometimes writes wrong during updates. It's safe. You'll need to rejoin your networks afterward.

Open System Settings → Network → Wi-Fi.
Click Advanced (or Details next to your network, then Manage Known Networks).
Remove every network you don't actively need. Yes, all the old coffee shop SSIDs too.
Turn Wi-Fi off.
Open Terminal and run these commands one at a time:

sudo rm /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.airport.preferences.plist
sudo rm /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.network.identification.plist
sudo rm /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/NetworkInterfaces.plist
sudo rm /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/preferences.plist

Reboot. Rejoin your Wi-Fi. Test by putting the Mac to sleep for 10 minutes and waking it.

If it holds, you're done. If it drops again, the plists weren't the problem — power management is.

Step 3: The 15-Minute Fix — Disable Wi-Fi Power Management

This is the real fix for most people. Sonoma aggressively powers down the Wi-Fi radio on sleep, and some chipsets don't wake cleanly. You're going to tell macOS to stop doing that.

Check the current power state

Open Terminal and run:

pmset -g

Look for womp (Wake on Magic Packet) and tcpkeepalive. If tcpkeepalive is 0, that's often the trigger — the machine drops TCP connections on sleep and doesn't reestablish them.

Set the fix

sudo pmset -a tcpkeepalive 1
sudo pmset -a womp 1
sudo pmset -a standby 0
sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0

On Apple Silicon, hibernatemode is ignored — skip it. The other three still apply.

What this does: keeps TCP connections alive during sleep, wakes the network stack on incoming traffic, and stops the deep standby state that some Broadcom chips can't recover from.

If you're on Intel with a Broadcom chip

You might also need to disable 802.11 power save at the driver level. There's no UI for this. Use the deprecated but still functional airport utility:

sudo /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/airport prefs JoinMode=Strongest

It's not officially supported on Sonoma but it still works on most Intel builds. Skip it on Apple Silicon — the command errors out.

Verify the change stuck

pmset -g custom

Confirm tcpkeepalive 1 and womp 1. Now sleep the Mac for 30 minutes. Wake it. If the Wi-Fi reconnects within 5 seconds, you're fixed.

Still Dropping? Two More Things to Check

Your router's band steering

If your router broadcasts the same SSID on 2.4 and 5 GHz, Sonoma's Wi-Fi stack sometimes gets stuck mid-roam after wake. Split the bands into separate SSIDs on the router, then connect the Mac only to the 5 GHz network. This fixes it for a surprising number of people.

Third-party VPN or network filter

Cisco AnyConnect, Zscaler, Little Snitch, and LuLu all hook into the network stack. They've all shipped buggy Sonoma builds that break wake-from-sleep. Quit them, test sleep/wake, and update to the latest version if that's the culprit.

When to Give Up and Reset

If nothing above works, do a full network reset. It's nuclear but effective:

Back up your Mac (Time Machine, at minimum).
Boot into Recovery (hold power on Apple Silicon, or Cmd+R on Intel).
Erase the drive and reinstall macOS Sonoma.
Restore from backup but uncheck the network settings.

Yeah, it's a lot. But I've seen Macs where the Wi-Fi plist corruption survived every plist delete because the corruption was in the sealed system volume. That's rare. Try everything else first.

Quick Reference

Symptom	Likely fix
Drops once, toggle fixes it	Step 1 (temporary)
Drops every sleep cycle	Step 3 — pmset tweaks
Drops only on one network	Router band steering or VPN client
Drops on every network, every time	Full reset (last resort)

One more thing: file feedback with Apple if you hit this. Sonoma 14.4 fixed it for some chipsets and broke it for others. They need to hear which hardware is still affected.

That's the whole playbook. Start at step one, work down, stop when it works. Don't waste hours on 'repair permissions' or PRAM resets — on Apple Silicon those don't do anything, and on Intel they almost never fix Wi-Fi sleep issues. Focus on power management. That's where Sonoma broke things.