At first I thought this was a Firefox problem because it coincided with an upgrade to Firefox. But I have since had Steam fail to save in the Steam Cloud (which has never happened to me before). It’s just most noticeable in Firefox because most of my internet activity is web browsing.
What’s weird is my internet is fine, and I can still use it. But on the first attempt to connect to a server it very often (but not always) behaves as if I don’t have an internet connection.
Firefox will say instantly “Unable to connect”, “Firefox can’t establish a connection to the server at ..”. There’s a “Try again” button, which usually won’t work. But after a few seconds, eventually it’ll work, and then that particular website will work fine.
A good example would be a Google search. If I do a search, it immediately says it can’t connect, but then once it connects, it’ll work. But 15 minutes later after I’ve been doing other stuff, a Google search will do the same thing again.
It will affect individual servers, so if images or scripts on a website are served on a different domain, they won’t load. And I have to repeatedly refresh the page to get it working properly. And then it will work fine as long as I keep using that website.
I thought maybe a DNS problem, but DNS seems fine. I tried dig and nslookup on lots of domains and it works immediately without failure. I tried switching DNS servers, but no difference.
The reason I now think it’s an OS problem is that my phone on WiFi is fine, and so is a MacBook, and all other devices connected. I have a fast fibre line to the premises, and I contacted the ISP and they say nothing is wrong, and I think they are right since all other devices work.
My Linux PC is plugged in via an ethernet cable. The internet works perfectly, except very often it fails instantly when trying to connect to any particular server - there’s a 25% it instantly fails as if I have no internet connection. The frustrating thing is it’s not even every time and isn’t predictable.
Has anyone heard of something like this before? Can I do anything to debug it further? I feel sure that a recent update a few days ago broke something but I don’t have any ability to debug this further.