Brother mfc is offline -

You could, remove it from devices and printers and reinstall it. should only take 10 maybe 15 mins to do. Quick and simple , I know it doesn't answer the question as to why your printer is misbehaving, but it will get you printing again.

Have you gone into control panel and selected administrative tools and then services. Scroll down to print spooler and disable and then re-enable it and see if that helps. Also check to make sure that the printer is compatible with your version of windows. May have to update your drivers. I have a MFC-7220 myself.

Hi,Check to see in the connectioncables are all plugged in correctly.Open the printer and see if drumunit and toner cartridges are installed correctly. Sometimes not well installedconsumables are the cause of that particular problem.See if the print driver on yourcomputer is correctly installed. Try and reinstall the driver.Check if your printer is working in onlinemode. Sometimes printer changes online to offline method. If printer is atoffline mode click Start button on your computer, enter Control Panel. Click onHardware and Sound and choose Printers. Right click on Brother MFC-9840CWD andmake sure that the Use Printer offline is not checked.Hope this helps.

Go to this link http://www.brother-usa.com/ModelDocuments/Consumer/Network%20Users%20Manual/NUM_DCP_375CW_MFC_255CW_295CN_EN_1783.PDF

I had the same problem, and couldn't find a solution anywhere. My laptop said the wifi Brother MFC-255CW printer was offline, when the printer was definitely online and connected.
In the end I simply went into Control Panel / Printers, selected the Brother printer, and deleted it off the network. Then I chose "Add a Printer" from the network, and reselected the only printer on my home network - which was the Brother MFC-255CW that I had just deleted. The computer reinstalled the driver, and everything was fine again - haven't had a problem since.

If you want to make it online, than make sure it is on and connected to your computer, Once you are sure about this than

Go to control panel than Printers and Faxes

There You need to right click on printer and than Use printer online

IT will Put you printer back online.

First off, make sure that you have turned both the printer and the computer off and then turn them on(cycle the power). When you go to the printer in 'printers' be sure that the printer is not light in color, if it is, then it's failed to come back online or it's broken. When you say, 'I have tried going into the control panel and clicking on print offline', I take you to mean 'print online', because you don't want to print offline, you want it online...

The easiest way to solve this is to move the usb plug going into the computer from the printer from one port to another, this will force the computer to re recognize the printer. I see that this printer has network capability. I am assuming, that the printer is connected via USB and not Ethernet. [USB, rectangle the size of your pinky, but narrow, Ethernet looks like a big phone plug]. If you move the plug from one USB slot to another and you don't hear the hardware connect sound(low tone then high tone), then your printer may be broken. It is possible if it is broken that the Ethernet port still works, but using that is beyond this discussion.

Good luck,

Brett

I had this same problem. What I did was I deleted the printer from the control panel. I then clicked on add a printer and it added the printer back. I printed a test page and it worked fine.

My printer is set up wirelessly on a D-Link router.

Hi,

I had the same problem with a Brother MFC-6490CW AIO printer. Here is how I resolved it:

Open the printers folder.
Right-click on the Brother printer and display the Properties page
Select the Ports tab.

In my system (Vista Premium), the selected port was a WSD port (whatever that means). Further down the list, there was a TCP/IP port that was obviously created by the Brother installation software. I selected the Brother-created TCP/IP port (which deselected the WSD port), applied the changes, and suddenly my printer was online. No idea what the difference between these two ports is, but I'll stick with the TCP/IP port until further notice.