Troubleshooting Wi-Fi not working

If your Wi-Fi interface is not working, you might experience the following:

• There is no Wi-Fi menu in the system menu:

  

• There is a Wi-Fi menu in the system menu, but connecting to a Wi-Fi network fails.

• The interface is disabled because MAC address anonymization failed:

  

  In this case, you can disable MAC address anonymization in the Welcome Screen. Doing so has security implications, so read carefully our documentation about MAC address anonymization.

• The following notification appears:

  Activation of network connection failed
  

To connect to the Internet, you can try to:

• Use an Ethernet cable instead of Wi-Fi if possible. Wired interfaces work much more reliably than Wi-Fi in Tails.

• Share the Wi-Fi or mobile data connection of your phone using a USB cable. Sharing a connection this way is called USB tethering.

  

  See instructions for:

  • iPhones or iPads

    Only sharing mobile data works on iPhones and iPads; sharing Wi-Fi does not work.

  • Android

  Tails cannot hide the information that identifies your phone on the local network. If you connect your phone to a:

  • Wi-Fi network: the network can see the MAC address of your phone.

    This has security implications that we explain in our documentation on MAC address anonymization. Some phones have a feature to hide the MAC address of the phone.

  • Mobile data network: the network is able to know the identifier of your SIM card (IMSI) and the serial number of your phone (IMEI).

• Buy a USB Wi-Fi adapter that works in Tails:

  Vendor	Model	Size	Speed	Price	Buy offline	Buy online
  Panda Wireless	Ultra	Nano	150 Mbit/s	$20	No	Amazon
  ThinkPenguin	TPE-N150USB	Nano	150 Mbit/s	$64	No	ThinkPenguin

• Check in our list of known Wi-Fi issues if there is a workaround to get your Wi-Fi interface to work in Tails.