Bogus Avast "you're offline" messages on boot-up

We are seeing Avast pop up a message claiming users are “offline” and should check their internet connections, on boot-up, with Avast Business Pro and the cloud Business hub. These messages are wrong; the user is certainly online at the time the messages appear. I myself also saw this yesterday evening with the free version of AVG (an Avast-owned product).

No doubt this is a bug. Any idea when it will be fixed?

Did you upgraded to 23.10 version?

No. I see a reboot is pending on a machine on our network that is on version 23.9.2771. However, these notifications seem to be sporadic; not everyone sees them. I did not see one on this machine, for example. Do you have definitive knowledge that this is fixed in 23.10.xxx?

Well, I do not see this error on any machine with 23.10. We also upgraded Avast Agent to 23.6.

My machine is now on Program Version 23.10.2775 and I got this alert today.

What is “Avast agent”? This is Avast Business Pro with the cloud “business hub” console. We generate a client installer from that console, but I’m not aware of anything that’s called “Avast agent”.

Thanks.

And that is agent. :wink:

You should generate new client installer and install it on stations. You can see agent version in hub console. Current is 23.6.1792.

Okay, but we have about 85 or 90 machines here, and the installation is a manual process for many of them (the “push” feature in the Business Hub doesn’t work very well at all; we get a lot of spurious errors claiming the credentials provided for the installation are invalid). That would take quite a long time. I would much prefer that this problem be corrected in the normal course of automated program updates that are received daily by the clients.

I have about 200 stations and I am able to push new agent (via Active Directory) in less than hour. 8)

All I can say is, the push is not reliable here. We get bogus errors that the administrative credentials we supply are invalid. That’s incorrect, because all of the workstations have the same administrative creds, and some, but not most, of those pushes do succeed with those creds. I did ask for help with that on this forum some time ago and never received any responses.

In any event, notifying end users that their devices are offline, whether that’s true or not, is not a necessary or appropriate feature for an anti-malware system. In fact, a workstation that is offline is safer from malware than one that is online. It’s definitely not a security issue. I would prefer that Avast not try to be “all things to all people” and that this alert be removed entirely if Avast is not going to commit to fixing this bug by means of ordinary program updates.