I spent half of yesterday searching for a solution when my computer “couldn’t access the internet” when I tried to update my system.
Turns out, I was out of space on my OS partition.
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Yeah, funny things can happen. 
How did you solve it?
Gparted to adjust. I actually noticed when I live booted to see if I could reach the internet that way. Can’t remember exactly why I opened Gparted or what I thought it might tell me, but once I did, it told the whole sordid tale. 
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Once I spent half a day troubleshooting my employer-issued work laptop. The cursor kept moving by itself. Stuff on my taskbar opened & closed by itself. Things got selected & highlighted on my desktop without my prompting. It would work normally for several minutes, then start acting up again. The keyboard & touchpad worked normally. It felt like a hacker was toying with me. On a locked-down enterprise laptop, my troubleshooting options were very limited. I gave up and started typing a help ticket. Then I discovered I had a wireless mouse in my pocket…
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A billion years ago I was second-tier tech support for a pc to mainframe connectivity company. User from a govt agency calls up, can’t get a connection to the mainframe. The error he’s getting is a 510, which on token-ring networks is a generic ‘can’t connect’ error.
These can be caused by a whole list of stuff, some on the pc, some on the network. I start with the basics of driver installation and memory range (yeah, this is back in the AUTOEXEC.BAT days), work through some app and installation checks. Dude is getting audibly more frustrated – probably has a deadline or something; he was second-tier support after all.
I’m at the point of asking him to conf call one of their networking guys on the line when he says, “Oh, wait a minute. There’s a cable on top of the PC.” Turns out the desks had been moved about the office and not reconnected to the network.
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When we first got a computer in the very early 90s, it was an IBM 8088 running MS-DOS with a 10 MG hard drive. So my husband started deleting everything he considered unnecessary from the OS.
He deleted config.sys.
What’s funnier (to me) is that within 5 years, he was a SQL DBA, and within another decade, he was a top-tier SQL expert at MSFT,* flying around the country to troubleshoot computer problems at major corporations.
And I NEVER stopped teasing him about deleting config.sys.
*He’s the one who introduced me to Linux, and he used to say that he’d rather tell people that he played piano in a whorehouse than admit that he worked for MSFT. 
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