WebHooks Still Failing

GitLab 12.4.0-ee running on CentOS 7

A webhook added to a project fails when tested.
I get a web page saying “500, something went wrong on our end”
and the gitlab-rails/production.log says

Net::HTTPFatalError (503 “Service Unavailable”):

System/Network.Outbound requests are set to allow.

WTF, folks ?

Did you try to curl/wget the webhook uri from the server/container running gitlab to see if it succeeds ?

Yes, but the command line operation behaves differently than the actual hook.
With “https” in the URL, I get Net::HTTPFatalError (503 “Service Unavailable”) in the logs.
With only “https”, I get a Network Error-404 return code and a response body telling me that the requested host’s FQDN could not be resolved by DNS, which is BS because it is in both DNS and /etc/hosts