M1 Mac Studio: No internet/network, Wi-Fi/Ethernet connected

If there are add-on anti-malware apps, add-on firewall apps including Little Snitch, or add-on VPN apps, remove all per vendors’ instructions, restart, and test again.

Have you shut down & restarted your Mac Sudio? If not, try it. Sometimes a cold reboot is all it takes to clear up some gremlins.

VPN:

A virtual private network, or VPN, is a private connection over the Internet from a device to a specific network.  VPN technology is widely used in corporate environments. If you need to be "present" on an institutional network, a VPN is a great tool for accomplishing this. It is generally issued and controlled by the institution.

Almost all other uses are a SCAM. There is generally no need for you to have a private (and almost always MUCH slower) connection to a VPN vendor's Network, except to make it easier for them to harvest your data to sell. If you are behind a Router you control or Trust, there is NO security advantage whatsoever in using a VPN. Your connections are already encrypted in most cases.

If VPN vendors just stopped there, it would be bad. But many of these packages also insist on scanning all your files, non-stop, -- nominally looking for viruses, but who knows for sure what data they are harvesting. Their non-stop file reading punishes your computer's performance in the process.

Some also break into your other secure connections so they can be FIRST to examine your data, often leaving your Mac MORE vulnerable to attack.

What VPN service to use?

DON'T use VPN services

https://gist.github.com/joepie91/5a9909939e6ce7d09e29

There are absolutely uses for “coffee shop” VPN services, folks!

One of the best is getting your network activity centralized, collated, collected, packaged, personally-identified, and available for re-sale! (Security vendors do sell data. And these particular folks eventually did got fined. Not so much fined for selling your data, but fined for not disclosing that sale somewhere in the fine print of the licensing agreement that we all read.)

Another use for a “coffee shop” VPN is added connection overhead and performance degradation! Who doesn’t want a not-particularly-secure second encrypted tunnel wrapping part of the end-to-end tunnel, and with added overhead, and with routing issues added!

And all this at the cost of just trusting what amounts to pinky-promise security. Sure, some of the add-on VPN vendors and some of the add-on security vendors might actually be (or are) legitimate. But some of the “no logging” vendors were also caught logging when the “non-existent” logs were found on the ‘net.

One available privacy-focused option available is iCloud+ Private Relay, which involves connections shuffled via two separate vendors.

Other available options include your own VPN server via Algo, or a travel router that connects into your own network and your own gear.

Outside of geoshifting for website or CDN testing or such, I wouldn’t generally recommend an add-on “coffee shop” VPN.