Problem
Kernel 6.16.3 (and later) causes intermittent network issues on both wired and wireless connections. Often these appear in a web browser as failures to load a page. They may also show up as connection failures in other network-connected apps (Steam, Discord etc).
Cause
A kernel change introduced a regression, causing IPv4 broadcast packets to be incorrectly formed.
A fix is expected to be deployed in kernel 6.16.5, but this is unconfirmed at time of writing.
Related Issues
Bugzilla report: 2390937 (refers to a USB ethernet connection, but described the same behaviour also affecting wifi and “regular” ethernet connections).
Upstream kernel Bugzilla ticket: 220484
User problem reports on Ask Fedora: Kernel 6.16.3 and Intel ax200 wifi
Workarounds
Workarounds
Workarounds are no longer needed, because the issue has been solved. This section is kept here in case you need to undo a workaround that you performed on your machine.
Regular Fedora
Users of non-atomic Fedora systems can boot from an older kernel version (the 6.15 kernel series is unaffected by this bug) by selecting it in GRUB - mash F8 during early boot. This is a one-time change affecting only the current boot.
Users can also change the GRUB default to an older kernel following the instructions here (warning, only for expert users).
Atomic Fedora
Fedora Atomic users can override the kernel package with the latest 6.15.10 kernel version with this command:
rpm-ostree override replace 'https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2025-261e8b1553'
Later, you can reset it back with:
rpm-ostree override reset kernel kernel-core kernel-modules kernel-modules-core kernel-modules-extra kernel-tools kernel-tools-lib
See this guide for more info.
Solution
Please see this post.