Interesting stuff going on here:
The firewall was allowing us to get through to the sites we were at one time experiencing trouble communicating with. We have not made any changes to the configuration whatsoever.
We did have Wed. July 4th off from work as we celebrated America's Independence from England for the past 236 years.
Today we are back to connectivity problems, many https sites will time out in Chrome, or continue to show connecting in Firefox.
I verified the Balance Traffic settings were in place, and then I changed the gateway HTTPS is forced out, well that didn't fix it this time.
We are back to "what the heck is going on"