Can't connect to Malwarebytes.com (and other sites)

I am not sure what you mean by that? My ISP is AT&T U-verse. Also forgot to mention that the problem occurs on Chrome and IE. I flushed the DNS cache per some instructions on a random google search.

Update: After typing my initial message, I went back and hit the reload button a couple of times and eventually connected to Malwarebytes.com. When I clicked on the "download" button, it initially gave me a similar unable to connect error, but after clicking reload a couple of times I eventually got it to download. So I installed it and ran the scan. It only took about 10 minutes, compared with about 1.5 hours for a Windows Defender full scan - does that seem right?

Came back with one item: Scan Complete - Non-Malware Detected

Identified as a Threat. Name: PUP.Optional.SysTweak, Category: Potentially Unwanted Program, Type: Registry Key, Location: HKLM\Software\Systweak

I will hit "remove selected" and see what happens.

Update #2: After typing in the above, when I hit Submit your answer, I again couldn't connect to Tom's. Luckily I was able to save what I had typed to a word document and copy/paste it here. The only way I could get back to Tom's was to exit Chrome and get back in. My internet connection was fine the entire time as I was listening to iHeart radio without interruption.

I would agree that Windows Defender is not optimal. A while back, it detected a virus and supposedly "deleted" it, but it kept coming back.

I would not say I have no technical skills. Admittedly, I know much more on the hardware side of things, having built multiple successful rigs. In fact, I have been using computers since 1985 (Tandy TRS 80 Model 4), and have programmed in Basic, Fortran and Cobol (not recently, of course).

If my problem still exists tomorrow, I will revert to a disk image I created a month or so ago, restored to a spare HDD I have laying around. That has been my go-to solution in the past when my computer has experienced problems.

OK, I did some research this morning. Under Network Connections, Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4) Properties, the box "Obtain DNS Server address automatically" is checked.

Running the command prompt "ipconfig/all", Under DNS Server it shows the ip address of my router. So it looks like it will first go to the router to look for cached IP addresses for sites I have previously visited.

If I go into my router settings under diagnostics and do a Traceroute to Google's server, the first leg of the path is 172.11.88.1. If I type that address in the box and hit NSLookup, it returns "172-11-88-1.lightspeed.hstntx.sbcglobal.net". So I guess that is the secondary DNS server.

Note: Things are working fine this morning on all websites. I did power cycle the router last night and shut down my computer (not set to sleep like I normally do).

The only site I tried to visit to help remove a problem was Malwarebytes.com. All of the other sites were just my regular sites like iHeartradio, FoxNews.com, Tom's Hardware, Avid.com (Pro Tools software forum), etc.

As said above I eventually got to Malwarebytes and was able to download the free version and ran a full scan. What I though was odd that it only took about 12 minutes, and scanned 300,000 or so objects, whereas Windows defender takes over an hour and scans over a million objects. Also, Malwarebytes did not scan my data drive, only the OS drive. Data drive contains recorded TV, mp3 files, dvd files, backups of ProTools audio session files and some Acronis True Image disk images, so it should be pretty safe, but I would still like to run the malwarebytes scan on it. Maybe I just didn't see in the settings where to select the drive to scan.

If I have problems like this again, I will try using a different server. But the odd thing is, that when I was unable to connect to FoxNews.com yesterday, my wife's computer was able to easily connect. Same router/modem, except she is connected via a wifi range extender and I am connected via ethernet cable.

OK, so I dug around some more in the Malwarebytes Anti-Malware Home program that I downloaded. Clicking on the Scan button near the top of the screen allows you to select Custom Scan, where you can select which drives (including thumb drives) to scan. I did this for my C and D drives and the scan took 2.5 hours to complete, which to me looks like the traditional virus scan I am used to.

Oddly enough it did find one Potentially Unwanted Program, which was in my Downloads folder. It was the setup file for an older version of CPU-Z (cpu-z_1.62-setup-en.exe) that I had saved. It identified it as an non-malware detection. I let the program delete it none the less as I have a more recent version of CPU-Z installed.