Firefox Down: Browser fails to Connect to the Internet and How to Fix It

A new Firefox update caused the browser to go down today, as it wouldn’t connect to the internet and in some cases even crash.

Currently stuck with @firefox.
Sites won’t load. Not even a status on the bottom left. Can load sites after refreshing FF but will revert back to this after a few minutes. Refreshed, reinstalled, restarted (pc), still nothing. Already reported. pic.twitter.com/D74PNDR4JY

— Ced 🚲🖥🎮 (@smithees) January 13, 2022

Users report that the outage is similar to not having an Internet connection- though the effect was localized entirely to Mozilla Firefox, meaning other browsers could still access the Internet, and more importantly, tweet about it.

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“Didn’t even know it was possible for a browser like this to go down centrally. Are we routing through a Mozilla server every time we load a webpage in firefox or something? What the heck”, writes one redditor.

In more extreme cases, trying to load anything would prompt Firefox to straight-up crash, or become non-responsive.

The official Firefox Twitter account hasn’t officially commented on the issue, although the community seems to have tracked down the issue.

For those who enjoy technical information, it looks like the bug causes an infinite loop in one of the processes, making the browser eat CPU while not loading any pages.

How To Fix The Firefox Down Issue

As someone who uses Firefox, I had the issue as well, and managed to fix it by simply refreshing the browser, though several users report that it doesn’t work for everyone.

The community seems to have pinned the fix as follows (thanks to Twitter user @Aussermayr for the fix).:

Type ‘about:config’ in Firefox search bar
Search for ‘network.http.http3.enabled’
Switch to ‘false’
Restart the browser

“While browsing, pages suddenly stopped loading. A look with htop showed the main process’ socket thread eating 100% CPU and a look with perf top showed it jumping around Http3 ReadSegments and OnReadSegment code.”, writes Jan Alexander Steffens, who reported the bug to the database.

“It’s not related to a specific version, we’re getting reports ESR is even affected. Suspicion is around some long existing HTTP3 bug that’s being triggered by an external service updating.” writes user Gian-Carlo Pascutto.

Users are also saying that it’s affecting the auto updater, so there’s no word on how Mozilla plans to get a fix out.