Problem with network speed, laravel sail

Hi all,

Looking for some advice. I have a laravel 9/vue3 project that I've been working on happily for about 6 months. My local environment is Windows 11, WSL2(ubuntu), Docker desktop, Laravel Sail. This has been working really well for me. Yesterday docker desktop just stopped working and then I got caught in the perpetual "docker desktop starting" loop. It would eventually time out.

I ended up just uninstalling docker desktop and installing it again fresh, which got me onto version 4.17.1. I have my project back up and running however external api requests which are being made from the laravel backend out to an external API are now taking 2 minutes to initialise. I have to believe there is a docker networking issue at play here but I haven't been able to figure it out.

I seem to recall having this same problem the first time I installed this stuff but it seems I haven't made a note of what I did to fix it.

The laravel api itself is all good, it's just external network requests which are affected. I've been googling all day but still haven't managed to get it fixed.

Do any of you have any bright ideas on how to fix this?