Hi @Sailing_Nut
If you are using UDP broadcast (either global or subnet) to send your packets, there is a weird thing in the recent TI CC3000 patches that make UDP broadcast not work until you do some other network "thing". The minimal "thing" that I found was to ping the gateway (router) so that whatever is stuck in the TI part (likely ARP related) gets unstuck. Obviously with the cloud on, that unsticks the TI part for you.
See this thread for details: