Firefox returns to normal after more than 4 hours without connection

13/01/2022 – 9:30 Updated: 13:00 – 01/13/22

The Firefox browser suddenly stopped working this morning, a bug that affected users around the world but has already been fixed by Mozilla.

Shortly after 9 AM PST, the Firefox web browser stopped working. The pages were not loading, and the browser seemed to have been left in an infinite loop.

Furthermore, in this situation the Firefox processes begin to consume many resources, occupying 20% of the CPU in some cases; therefore, users noticed how the rest of the programs are also slower or we began to have problems using it.

Finally, and after four hours of problems, the situation is already returning to normal. The Firefox development team has confirmed on its official Twitter account that it has confirmed the connection problems, but claims that they have already been fixed.

If we still have problems in Firefox, all we should do is restart the browser; although if it still does not solve it, we could also restart the computer to make sure that no processes are left in the background.

Hi folks,

Firefox has witnessed outages recently and we are sorry about that. We believe it’s fixed now and a restart should restore Firefox to normal. We will provide more information shortly. #firefoxdown #firefox

?? Firefox Support (@FirefoxSupport) January 13, 2022

However, Mozilla has not explained exactly what happened, and only promises that it will provide more information soon. Firefox was recently updated to version 96, with some new features in Internet video streaming and bug fixes, but at this time it is not confirmed that this was the problem.

The theory that has gained the most force in recent hours is that the ‘culprit’ is a server to which the browser connects every time we start it; Everything indicates that the server has been updated with an implementation of HTTP3 with problems, and therefore the browser was fine if we deactivated HTTP3 from the Firefox configuration.

This problem has generated many questions in the community, including why the browser has to make that connection by default, or why Mozilla did not realize that the browser would get ‘caught’ if the server does not respond correctly. Hopefully Mozilla will answer these questions in a future publication.