When running php artisan serve in laravel, crashes on intial page load

The command php artisan serve seems to run, gives me the standard green text with http://localhost:8000 as where to go. Previously this worked fine, then it stopped today. What happens is I go to the page after running the command, and the page gives me the following message:

Unable to connect

Firefox can't establish a connection to the server at localhost:8000.

The site could be temporarily unavailable or too busy. Try again in a few moments.
If you are unable to load any pages, check your computer's network connection.
If your computer or network is protected by a firewall or proxy, make sure that Firefox is permitted to access the Web.

Also php artisan serve in command line stops and returns me to the command line in terminal. There are no messages getting put to the /storage/logs and no messages put out to the terminal.

Laravel version is 5.1.40 (LTS) . Previously this worked, even tried using an older branch and it doesn't work now.

via Chebli Mohamed