A Bizarre MacOS freezing issue.
Okay, I’ve experienced this twice, so I want to know if other MacOS users have experienced it:
In rare occasions, MacOS experiences these symptoms: ,
- It prompts you for your Apple cloud accounts (as if you got signed out)
- WiFi gets disconnected,
- Currently running processes would malfunction. Most won’t respond (e.g., the menubar, background processes), you can’t launch new processes through the Dock or other means (worst of all, you can’t launch a Terminal). Usually the only ones that work are your foreground apps, the Dock, Launchpad and Alfred.
- Some apps will try to launch, but will either crash silently.
- More and more apps lose control until you’re forced to reboot with the power key.
Everything resumes to normal after this, but it bothers me because it’s either a memory leak somewhere (checked the logs, the above events somehow flood it and it’s hard to determine) or a malware attack. And thankfully, it doesn’t look like ransomware that’s cryptolocking system files.
But what if it is? Oh god I hope not. I have backups for everything important, but this was before I had my Time Machine set up and it’ll still take hours or days to make things back to normal even with backups.
In the end, I’m kinda annoyed. This ain’t a problem in Linux since there’s always virtual consoles I can switch to at anytime and can immediately invoke commands to kill processes or do a REISUB for severe situations.
And honestly, a kernel panic at this point is better than a slowly freezing machine.