The morning of Jan 24 there was an issue with the pfSense pkg server. If pfSense checked for an update, the service would use 100% of one of the cores. For me it was more of a curiosity as to why the CPU usage was so high. However, it sounds like there are many people out there with pfSense instances with only 1 core. For those people, this was a major issue to the point of traffic not being passed. This is the Netgate tweet and here is a thread on the Netgate forum. It sounds like the only solution at the moment is to not check for updates when the servers are broken.
Interesting, I have observed this behavior from a misconfigured DNS on pfsense because it would hang checking for updates. Weird that their update server going down would also cause the system to hang. The should re-write the code so it just times out instead of hanging.
I’m not 100% sure what state the servers were in. Some were saying that it was a problem with the handshake not that the servers were down. Either way you should be able to have a time out after a couple of minutes. It also seems like checking for updates should need to use 100% of a core.
I had the same issue with all pfsense box’s at different locations. It did eventually recover but took several hours.