Minecraft crashes with "java.lang.NullPointerException: Ticking screen" while pinging server on multiplayer server list (previously due to network issues, now more frequent)

What I expected to happen was...:
Minecraft to be staying idle on the background minimalized without any issuse
What actually happened was...:
It crashed with a Ticking screen error
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open minecraft 1.10.2
2. Minimilize it
3. maybe open a second minecraft and see if thas the issuse

Description: Ticking screen

java.lang.NullPointerException: Ticking screen
	at io.netty.bootstrap.Bootstrap.checkAddress(Bootstrap.java:273)
	at io.netty.bootstrap.Bootstrap.doConnect(Bootstrap.java:150)
	at io.netty.bootstrap.Bootstrap.connect(Bootstrap.java:132)
	at io.netty.bootstrap.Bootstrap.connect(Bootstrap.java:113)
	at bls.b(SourceFile:165)
	at bls.a(SourceFile:45)
	at bls$1.a(SourceFile:144)
	at eo.l(SourceFile:382)
	at bls.a(SourceFile:254)
	at bhj.e(SourceFile:116)
	at bcx.t(SourceFile:1601)
	at bcx.av(SourceFile:968)
	at bcx.a(SourceFile:396)
	at net.minecraft.client.main.Main.main(SourceFile:124)

Hopper tickets

• MCX-2842585 (1.10.2)
• MCX-3487283 (17w14a)

Code analysis

Based on 1.11 decompiled using MCP 9.35 rc1

It looks like this crash can happen when the method net.minecraft.client.network.ServerPinger.ping(ServerData) was called while the user had an internet connection, but before a packet was received the internet connection was lost. Additionally the server needs to have a hostname which is not a literal IP address. In that case at some point the method net.minecraft.client.network.ServerPinger.ping(...).new INetHandlerStatusClient() {...}.onDisconnect(ITextComponent) is called. The problem lies in the method io.netty.bootstrap.Bootstrap.checkAddress(SocketAddress) which does check if the provided SocketAddress is an instance of InetSocketAddress (which include a null) check, but does not test if the method getAddress() returns null. This is the case if the host name cannot be resolved. As this netty version seems to be a custom build it should be fixable by Mojang.