[CentOS] Fail2ban problem

If there is a serious power failure, eg during an electric storm, and the internet goes down then my CentOS-6.2 server seems to take an inordinate time, maybe forever, to get past fail2ban. It is as though there is an extremely long - maybe an hour - timeout if fail2ban cannot connect to the internet.

(I usually stop the machine with the power-button, re-boot into a different OS (Fedora) and chkconfig off fail2ban.)

This only occurs once or twice a year, so I don't worry about it much; but I was wondering if there is a timeout that I can change somewhere in the fail2ban setup?