How to fix Chrome sync pausing and asking to sign in

Chrome’s sync feature can sync bookmarks, your browsing history, passwords, and it even lets you access the tabs you have open across other devices. It’s exceptionally useful and once you have it set up, you tend to get used to it always working and ensuring a seamless transition between different systems. There’s an odd problem that some Chrome users are facing with the sync feature pausing intermittently. Here’s how to fix Chrome sync pausing and repeatedly asking you to sign in.

Fix Chrome sync pausing

This appears to be an odd feature that’s enabled by default. You can turn it off from the Chrome Flags page. Open Chrome and enter the following in the URL bar. Tap enter.

chrome://flags

On the Chrome Flags page, use the search bar and look for ‘account consistency’. This will bring up a flag called ‘Identity consistency between browser and cookie jar’. Open the dropdown next to it and select ‘Disabled’. Relaunch Chrome to apply this change and sync should no longer pause at random.

While this should work, there is one other fix that other Chrome users have been able to use to fix this problem. The above solution is what works for most but in case it doesn’t do the trick for you, what you can do is, whitelist the following domain under Chrome’s cookies.

accounts.google.com

To do that, open a new tab and enter the following in the URL bar;

chrome://settings/content/cookies

On the Cookies window, click the Add button next to the Allow section and enter the domain mentioned earlier. Once it’s been added, Chrome will no longer pause syncing.

Multiple work stations

If you’re using Chrome sync on multiple work stations, you need to make the above two changes to all of them. This problem can appear on any one of the work stations that you’re using Chrome and Chrome sync on so it’s best to apply it on all systems that use the same Google account to sync.

This ‘bug’ surfaced towards the end of last year and it seems that sync is paused every two weeks on average. You might be signed out more often, or less often but two weeks is what most users note as an active sync period.

When syncing pauses, you’re unable to access open tabs, newly added bookmarks, and the browsing history on the Chrome browser you added them on. Fortunately, once sync is turned back on, everything syncs the way it normally should have.