There are tons of problems possible - the firewall you know, another firewall, a wrong router, a wrong ip address, a wrong port forwarding, a .htaccess, an application answer / error.
The "check-your-website" has now some spam. Best solution - sleep 5 seconds, check, if the client is connected, sleep again. Looks like a timeout, but it is application generated. Some bots are 50 seconds busy checking that, stops a lot of spam.
I have forgotten to mention, according to crt.sh | etrust.pacifictrustees.com , I have noted that during the renewals in April and May, our firewall wasn't with us as our office hit a power surge and the adapter was fused. We did not face any problems for it being updated. In January and March, our firewall was still with us and the renewal was successful. Our firewall was reinstalled in June. Therefore, I think our firewall vendor misconfigured something.