Like the title says, NOTHING has changed on my mac running Mojave but Avast and AVG (tried after uninstalling Avast) both don’t work at all. Install fine and can’t activate any shield because of massive problems with Avast’s servers.
“We’re sorry. There is some problem on our side. We’ll fix it as soon as possible.”
Having installed on 23rd Oct, I have not been able to activate shields either. My more pressing concern is what seems like a conflict with Adobe Software. It’s not been value for money so far.
Hello,
For our shields to function, we need to load kernel extensions (well, on Big Sur other mechanism is used). However since I think MacOS 10.12 we have seen several errors when we are attempting to load kernel extension over time. After reporting these to Apple, we were told that these will never be fixed in the old versions and that we should urge users to update to newest MacOS. However even on Catalina similar issues pop up time to time.
There are several issues that pop up, sometimes there are “wrong access permissions”, sometimes “reason unspecified”, but we have seen other errors. We have verified several times that the Avast installation and the kernel extension are not damaged. The problem is that this happens within MacOS itself and we can not do nothing to fix this. The only thing that sometimes works is restarting your Mac.
Luckily the issue is very rare. Unfortunately, we do not have a special message for this; I will ask our product manager if we could add a more informative error message for this. But we are not aware of any way how to actually solve the issue.
We appologise for the issue.
Kind regards,
Ondrej Kolacek
Please post a link on the Avast website where it talks about all of the problems that you’ve had getting Avast and AVG to work at all on Macs. I’m sure that it’s not the case where Avast is continuing to make money off of people while knowing that their software doesn’t work.
would it be possible to get a support package to see more detailed logs to address the situation please?
Just submitted a support package. Seems like all Macs are having this problem now as the reports are starting to pile up online.
Works perfectly with Sierra.
Not interested in downgrading to a 5 year old OS.
My friend is having the same problem! Could you let me know if you find a solution?
Avast knows that it’s been a problem and has no idea how to fix it. They claim that it’s Apple’s fault and Apple says that it’s Avast’s fault.
Switching to Sophos fixed the problem for me.
Hello,
please if this issue is happening to you, and you are willing to help us with diagnostics:
open a Terminal app, run the following command
sudo kextutil -t -v 6 /Applications/Avast.app/Contents/Backend/drivers/AvastPacketForwarder.kext &>~/Desktop/avast_kextutil.log
this will create avast_kextutil.log file in your Desktop folder containing details about why loading our kernel extension has failed
immediately afterwards generate Apple’s diagnostic file by running command
sudo sysdiagnose
follow the instructions and read about what the file will contain. If you are comfortable with sending this file to us, upload the resulting huge file (path where it resides will be printed to the terminal when the command finishes, also it may be opened in Finder) somewhere (dropbox, google drive, icloud, see below for instructions for the latter) and send me the avast_kextutil.log and a link to the sysdiagnose file to ondrej.kolacek@avast.com . I will dig into the possible reason why this is failing for you, try to find out if we can somehow fix this, and report the issue to Apple in case we have not done so for the found reason.
or 2a) if you are not comfortable with sending the sysdiagnose file, use Feedback Assistant app to report the issue to Apple. You do not have to add the sysdiagnose file, since Feedback Assistant will generate it for you during the send process. Include the content of avast_kextutil.log and mention that load of kernel extension has failed in the feedback. Please send me avast_kextutil.log to ondrej.kolacek@avast.com anyway.
Regarding sharing the file, you can go to https://www.icloud.com/iclouddrive/ , log in, use the upload button (the cloud icon on the top) to upload the file, then select the uploaded file, use the Share file button (person with + icon on the top), click on Share options, select Anyone with the link, permission View only, click on Share button, this will provide you a link like https://www.icloud.com/iclouddrive/0gN2b0mof1OQAFWAFWARoA#test_File
to send to me.
Thank you for your assistance.
Kind regards,
Ondrej Kolacek