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…

An incorrect MTU causes fragmentation or packet drops that affect all IP traffic uniformly regardless of file size, not a selective failure that only impacts large multimedia files.

QoS policies classify and prioritize or rate-limit traffic based on type or size; a misconfiguration during maintenance could impose bandwidth caps or low-priority queuing on large multimedia transfers while allowing small low-bandwidth requests like text and HTML to pass normally, matching the described symptom pattern exactly.

An incorrect VLAN assignment would result in complete or near-complete connectivity loss for affected PCs since they would be on the wrong broadcast domain, not a size-selective slowdown.

Excessive LAN latency increases round-trip time for all traffic proportionally and would not selectively prevent large multimedia files from loading while permitting small files through.