When users report that they cannot connect to a web-facing application despite the service running and network connectivity being established, the next step is to check the firewall rules to ensure that traffic on the port used by the web application is not being blocked. In the case of a typical web application, you would check for rules that allow traffic on ports 80 and 443 for HTTP and HTTPS, respectively. If these rules are not present or are misconfigured, the firewall would prevent external users from connecting to the application. Checking the status of a service or the ports being listened on, while potentially useful in other scenarios, would not address a firewall configuration issue.