El Capitan: Cannot Connect to the App Store

Hi Marina.

Did you export the certificates first? You can save to your documents. I then selected everything and right-clicked. It gave me the option to delete and I did. I went back to reopen app store, waited some seconds and it worked. I've inserted what my key chain looks like, and this was AFTER I had deleted the certificates there before, so obviously, the system corrected itself. When you right click, it should give you an option to delete. I hope it works this time. Try restarting your computer before trying it again.

Thanks DitchVictim. Your point about nuking the verisign certs was spot on. I spent hours on the phone with apple level 1,2 & 3 techs and they had me delete the certs with "blue plus signs" (which did not help), but said nothing about the verisign login certs.

This was the fix to all app store and iTunes access/cert problems.

Thank you for advice. I've tried to delete only certificates with VeriSign.

When I clicked the button delete 7 items I saw the window to confirm my password and after that there were 7 popups with the message UNIX[Operation not permitted]

Then I restarted the system but the situation has not changed.

Sorry. Perhaps I did not understand your correctly. Did you told to export all the certificates and to delete all of them? 🙂

Cannot access iTunes, AppStore, or iCloud from my Mac Pro running El Capitan 10.11.2. No problem accessing apple store via Firefox or Safari.

No joy with the jtparten/DitchVictim approach. No Verisign certificates in my keychain. Consider me stumped. Thanks for the info, though.

Trying this from Apple. OS X: "Cannot connect" or "Cannot connect to the App Store. An internet connection is required" - Apple Support

Edit your Keychain.

The Keychain holds passwords and certificates used to create authenticated connections from apps such as Mac App Store. If the issue still happens after following the previous steps, try editing your Keychain.

1. Open Keychain Access located in /Applications/Utilities/
2. Select Certificates from the left hand column under Category
3. Type Class into the search field in the top right corner of the Keychain Access window and press return.
4. Look through the list of results for any certificates that have a blue + over the icon.
5. Double-click on a certificate that has the blue + over the icon to ‘Get info’ on the certificate.
6. Click the disclosure triangle to the left of the word Trust to reveal the certificates permissions.
7. Change Secure Sockets Layer (SSL): to ‘No Value Specified’ then close the window.
8. Confirm the Administrator password in the window that will appear.
9. Double-click on the same certificate that was opened in step 5.
10. Again Click the disclosure triangle to the left of the word Trust to reveal the certificates permissions.
11. Change When using this certificate: to ‘Use System Defaults’ then close the window.
12. Again confirm the Administrator password in the window that will appear.
13. Repeat steps 5 through 12 for any certificates that have a blue + over the icon. (Generally there are only one or two that will need to be edited.)
14. Restart the system and test for the issue.

Important: If the certificates do not allow themselves to be modified as is needed in steps 5 through 11, you need to reinstall OS X. After reinstalling, attempt these steps again.

The above did not work for me. Hope it helps someone else.

I had a similar problem. My computer couldn't log into iCloud nor app store. I had a corrupt plist file that was even there when I restored my computer back to an earlier time via time machine when it was still working good. After spending 8 hours in apple chat with a tech one day and 2 hours on the phone today, here is what we discovered:

Here is an FYI for anyone interested in the trouble I went through and how we finally resolved it. You mileage may vary.

What had happened, and it probably wasn’t the fault of El Capitan, was a plist file got corrupted be they had no idea how it could corrupt that same file even in a time machine backup that was working fine back then. Here are the steps we used to solve it.

1. open “finder”, click on the computer internal hard drive.

2. click on Library

3. click on preferences

4. click on systemconfiguration folder

5. inside that folder find networkinterface.plist file and drag it to trash.

Restart computer. The plist will remake itself. open app store and try to log in (be hooked up with a cable to your router). Ok that sounds simple enough, but after 8 hours in apple chat they were unable to get my computer to reconnect to my wifi (my ethernet card is dead so I can only use wifi). We finally had to delete the new plist and drag the old one back in to get hooked up to my wifi router, and of course the problem was still there. So, when I was talking to apple tech today (for 2 hours), they had me do the same thing (I told them it wouldn’t work because we couldn’t get wifi), but the new tech knew what he was doing and he took me a step further. After restarting the computer we went to step 2.

1. open system preferences in your applications folder

2. click on network

3. on the left side of network window is a list of of connections. we turned off wifi and deleted my wifi connection.

4. then click on the “+” at the bottom of list on the left and add a wifi connection (pick your router from the list)

5. click on advanced in the bottom right of the window and in the TCP/IP tab, make sure the first line “configure IPv4” line shows “using DHCP”. If it doesn’t, click on the arrows on the right and choose that

6. then click on the “renew DHCP Lease”

7. click OK

8. click “apply” in the main window.

The wifi connected and everything worked. Even though it probably wasn’t the fault of El Capitan (but it could have been), I wish the 8 hours I spent on chat with apple support could have taken me to step 2 and got it working so I wouldn’t have had to spend 2 days re-installing and restoring various OS X systems, and I would still be on el Capitan. However, I’ve gone back to Yosemite as my last resort (and it still didn’t work) so I’m going to stay on Yosemite with this computer.

I had the same problem after upgrading to El Capitan.

I read the discussions and after seeing some people saying you need to delete some certificates and even some .PLIST I made my own investigation and was able to find an easy fix.

I found a good article on how to fix WIFI connectivity issues after upgrading to El Capitan: http://osxdaily.com/2015/10/16/fix-wi-fi-problems-mac-os-x-el-capitan/

Based on this article here is what I did:

1- Went under System Preferences and Network

2- Clicked on location and created a new location: I call it: "TEST connection"

3- Clicked on advanced

4- TCP/IP > click on Renew DHCP lease

5- A message appeared, I clicked Apply

6- Click OK

Restart the computer.

After the restart I launched my browser to see if I could connect to the internet. Then I launched itunes and clicked on Store. Immediate connection.

I went back to System Preference and Network. Under location I deleted the Automatic location. I think something got corrupted there. Then rename "TEST connection" to Automatic.

You'll see in my post above that we basically did the same thing. You created a new "test" connection, then deleted the original automatic one, then renamed your test connection. I just deleted my default, then made a new connection. It's all the same thing, just two different ways to get a new connection. Everything else was the same (renew DHCP lease).

My quest to fix this ended with your wonderful advice. Thank you!

Thank you for taking the time to help the community. Your efforts saved me hours of angst and your solution worked perfectly.

Did you ever find a solution for this? I can acces iTunes but I can't access the app store.

I had a similar problem which was somehow fixed when I turned on my VPN. I'm not sure what that means but I now know that I need my VPN to access my app store.

I cleaned out a certificate but I didn't see a VeriSign one. I tried other methods suggested on the 1st page and I checked out my DNS IP addresses. I restarted my macair for the 5th time and after turning on my VPN, my WiFi connection is fine. But I am not sure what that means. I can't update my El Capitan without a VPN.

Nothing here worked for me.

Instead, I followed these steps:

— Open Activity Monitor

— Find "mDNSResponder"

— Force Quit Process

This worked for me, thanks Spydie2, no idea why deleting the networkinterface.plist file would solve an issue with the app store, when there was no problem connecting with anything else, but it did. Didn't even have to create a new wireless connection. Running OSX El Capitan v 10.11.4