Mark, thanks for the info and sharing your experience but for one thing, I don't use Edge. I neutered that browser in all of the computers quite some time ago. It doesn't even update.
Regardless, this isn't what happened here. For this to happen, there must be change. Nothing here has changed. There never is and never has been a news feed or google home page running in my Chrome so that possibility is out. The only things running in my Chrome are the same assortment of tabs that have been open in Chrome for years. They restore with every reboot and don't change. None have ever gone berserk. The only one that refreshes automatically is whatever Outlook account is loaded into outlook.live.com at the time. There's no reason for this browser to jump from averaging less than 50 mb a day to an average of more than 4500 per day. And then suddenly stop the drain with no changes in the browser at all
Nothing open in any tab could have changed the data usage of this very limited use browser from maybe a GB a month to 9.4 GB in two 24 hour days before suddenly stopping on it's own after depleting my plan data and 3.9 GB of my token bytes. On this, the third day the data drain dropped to 107.3 MB. I notice that number has now increased to 108 MB for the day. We'll see what Glasswire says tomorrow but it appears to be done.
Still, at this time nothing here can access the problem IP 2a03:2880:f082:112:face:b00c:0:1823 aka edge-video6-shv-02-ord5.fbcdn.net unless it's connected via Hughesnet. Connect through Verizon and the page cannot be loaded. This makes it look like it's something suspiciously particular to the Hughes network.
Edge is just one of the video issues. I assumed it was edge from the domain edge-video6*. When you expanded it, it's definitely a Facebook data server domain (fbcdn.net is Facebook's content data repository). You may not be able to access that domain directly. That said, Facebook does the same thing as Edge. They show and pre-load videos (some are ads) as you scroll them whether you want them or not. My wife used to scroll Facebook a lot on her phone until I pointed out how much data it uses behind the scenes - about the same rate as streaming an HD movie. What also doesn't help are all the high-res images that take a tremendous toll on data usage as well.
As to your remark about not changing what you do: Just remember that these platforms (and browsers) are updating what they do and how they do it constantly, many with complete disregard to those of us trying to conserve data usage - they're more driven by improving performance to the general public. Facebook is also notorious for changing your user-settings about not auto-loading video. In fact they change their platforms so fast that Facebook and it's family of apps (Messinger, Instagram, etc.) update just about twice a week now.
Since you stated you don't actually use Facebook, it may still be possible that Chrome has a Facebook plugin that is activating in the background, or some page you go to uses Facebook's CDN for their ads. This brings up another point: Just about anything that shows any kind of video or animation is going to be a black hole for data anymore, mainly because the videos themselves are becoming more and more hi-res. That includes games that show video ads.
