I experienced this a couple of weeks ago. My wifi was up, but my internetprovider was down. My Macbook came to a halt. Nothing worked anymore. The whole machine was extremely slow. When the internetprovider came back up again, everything was fine again.
Had the same thing earlier in the week as the isp was doing maintenance two nights in a row. 5+ seconds to start sublime and other really basic apps. Apple apps had no problem of course.
Remembering the notarization problems people were having months ago I did some tests and confirmed.
Now have little snitch installed again and my laptops going to be an Apple orphan. So I never noticed this problem today by virtue of it pissing me off 2 days before.
Airgapped network — an IP LAN not connected to the internet. These do exist, sometimes permanently for security reasons, and sometimes just where external connectivity sucks but you still want your laptop to talk to your NAS.
The point stands: if you allow a host to resolve ocsp.apple.com to an unresponsive (timeout) address, it might break macOS the same as today — whether by air gap, by firewall, or who knows what else.
