Facebook affecting my internet connectivity?

There's not a "tinfoil hat" forum, and that's good, because someone would moderate this post over there, were that an option. But I'm very serious, and scratching for answers.

On Thursday (2/1) night, the next day in the morning then at night, and today once - four times in all so far - I have had a weird thing happen sometimes when I have opened up the Facebook profile of someone using my Firefox browser.

The sequence goes like this:

• Directly from the URL bar autocomplete, or from google, open someone's Facebook profile.
• Profile will appear, with text and maybe one or two photos. But page won't completely load.
• I'll test my web access from the browser and nothing will work - google, any other constantly-accessed and "always-up" pages, none will load
• I'll open a command prompt and ping those same sites, and the pinging works fine
• I'll look at my phone, I'll be on wifi, I'll access some of those same sites and they'll load
• Go back to browser, still can't access pages
• Five(-ish) minutes pass, things return to normal
• I will check the router log, and there will be no record of interruption of connectivity or service (internet is through Spectrum, cable goes to modem, which is then cabled to router which is cabled to computer)

This does not happen from my regular Facebook page, which I reload every now and then. Only when going to other people's profiles. Mind you, the issue is not "why can't I see people's profiles in Facebook?" - issue is why is this internet connectivity problem happening, seemingly caused by accessing someone else's Facebook profile?

Two obvious things I have not tried yet:

• Accessing internet from different browser
• Trying from a different wi-fi connected computer in my house

I called Spectrum technical support and that was a pretty useless exercise (there isn't a number high enough for me to count to so I can simmer down, when it's suggested I clear my cookies and cache as a universal panacea). I was told to power my router down, then my computer, wait 15 seconds, power router up, then when it was fully online power computer back up.

I did those things, but since I've had maybe 15-20 minutes of outage, in 30-40 hours of internet usage during that time, having proper connectivity at any one time proves nothing.

Wondered for a bit if my Ethernet card - Realtek PCIe GBE - was failing, but I can't imagine a failing piece of hardware would allow me that much uptime.

Those are all the facts I can remember - can someone take a small leap of faith that I'm not crazy, and suggest some things to look for or try?

Hi 450125,

I'd have to say thats an internal Facebook thingy, good technical term there, as your inside thier server, however
could also be
running behind a proxy,
your Google profile and settings

Roy

Update:

After 48+ hours with no problem, because I'd never since done the Facebook sequence described in the original post, it happened again.

I was looking up a name in google. Found a list of facebook profiles with that name in google. Went to that page and it loaded fine. Went to an individual page from those results, and everything else unfolded as described in the second and following bullets above.

My Firefox browser was compromised for five minutes or so, while internet in the house continued to work, and internet on the computer, through a different browser, continued to work.

Ideas, please, on what's wrong here?

You need to try another browser. Also, if you are running a Script blocker or ad blocker in Firefox, turn them off to see if that eliminates the problem.

mrjimphelps said:

You need to try another browser. Also, if you are running a Script blocker or ad blocker in Firefox, turn them off to see if that eliminates the problem.

I appreciate the quick response.

But as I noted, a different browser (Internet Explorer) got to the internet fine while this problem was happening.

And I'm online a LOT - part of my job, but certainly more than a normal person, with multiple open FF windows, and more than 50 tabs open at any one time, all the time, and if a script blocker (none active that I know of), or AdBlock (yes, I have this) were a problem, it would be affecting other things. It doesn't. Just the one scenario I described, and a new problem as of four days ago.

Facebook is ad-driven - therefore, the possibility exists that an ad blocker might be causing the problem.

Not likely, but you won't know till you test it.