Had this weird production issue after performing deployment last week, suddenly the search functionality of our site which is provided by Google Search is no longer working.
Dumping the CFHTTP content, it indicated that there was a Connection Failure. And so it seems to suggest that there was connectivity issue from the application to the internet - but I just couldn’t make any sense out of it. I checked the server connectivity manually using the good old Lynx browser, I can confirm that the server can connect to outside world. The other ColdFusion application (this is a multi server setup) also doesn’t seem to have the same issue.
Spending few hours debugging and going around Google - my colleagues finally discovered the problem. Out of date JVM config file was the culprit! The JVM config file contains an outdated proxy configuration (we do not use proxy anymore). We then removed the proxy value from the config and restarted ColdFusion - problem solved!