Also show us which wget is installed. Run the type command to find the location of the file that provides wget, then ls -la the result to see what it really is, like this example:
$ type wget
wget is /usr/bin/wget
$ ls -la /usr/bin/wget
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 18 Mar 25 13:09 /usr/bin/wget -> /bin/uclient-fetch
That's your issue, busybox does not have the wget applet built into it by default.
Do you have uclient-fetch (almost certainly, as it's part of base install)? If so, that should be linked to wget.
# Check for uclient-fetch.
$ ls -la /bin/uclient-fetch
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 24619 Apr 3 08:51 /bin/uclient-fetch
# If that checks out, remove the broken symlink,
$ rm /usr/bin/wget
# and restore the link to uclient-fetch.
$ ls -sv /bin/uclient-fetch /usr/bin/wget
I just got bit with this and managed to fix it, as the above uclient-fetch workaround didn’t work for me.
I had a backup from 26/04/26 where I pulled /usr/libexec/wget-ssl out, placed it into my current install and fixed it up that way. For some reason, that had been deleted from my install, and wget was symlinked to busybox. No idea why.
You can try the following:
# Download latest wget-ssl direct from OpenWrt
curl -o /root/wget.apk "https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/25.12.2/packages/$(uname -m)/packages/wget-ssl-1.25.0-r2.apk"
# Use apk extract to fetch wget-ssl
mkdir /root/wget
apk extract --allow-untrusted --destination /root/wget /root/wget.apk
mv /root/wget/usr/libexec/wget-ssl /usr/libexec/wget-ssl
rm -rf /root/wget /root/wget.apk
# Fix permissions and symlink
chmod +x /usr/libexec/wget-ssl
rm /usr/bin/wget
ln -s /usr/libexec/wget-ssl /usr/bin/wget
chmod +x /usr/bin/wget
# Test fix
apk update