After scheduled network maintenance, users report that an externally hosted web application is particularly slow to load. Small items on the page load such as text documents and markup, but larger mul

Incorrect MTU (Maximum Transmission Unit) typically causes issues with all traffic or leads to fragmentation and reassembly overhead, making all network communication unreliable or slow, not specifically preventing large files while allowing small ones.

Misconfiguration of QoS settings is the most likely cause because QoS policies prioritize certain types of network traffic over others. If multimedia traffic is deprioritized or penalized excessively by a misconfigured QoS setting, it would explain why small, less bandwidth-intensive items load, but larger multimedia files fail to load or load very slowly.

An incorrect VLAN would either completely prevent network access for the affected PCs or place them on the wrong network segment, which would manifest as a complete lack of connectivity or incorrect IP addressing, not selective loading of content.

Excessive latency on the local LAN segment would generally slow down all network traffic uniformly for users on that segment, rather than selectively preventing only large multimedia files from loading while small text documents still load.