Traffic time out on LAN, Test Port immediate fail on WAN

[erasedhammer]

Background:
I was ssh'd into a device sitting on the wan side of my firewall. I left it idle for a few minutes and I come back and its frozen (putty didn't say connection time out).
The device in question is up and the port is open tested from a device in its own subnet.

Current problem:
If I try to ssh to a device on my WAN (from windows putty) the connection times out after a minute.
But using the test port function on pfsense, it immediately says connection failed.
A pcap on the wan interfaces shows the connection was never even attempted!
This leads me to believe something is wrong on pfsense, why would the test port function not show up in a pcap on the wan?

What is going on here?

[erasedhammer]

UPDATE:

I have corrected the problem by restarting the firewall.
I do not consider this an acceptable solution to this problem if I encounter it again in the future.
Anyone know why this would happen?