Why is the EA app affected by my firewall??

I am currently in hospital and therefore using public hospital wifi. The EA app would not run and would tell me there was an internet problem. I tried using a VPN, which didn't fix anything, and then I read some other posts on here of people saying the app was blocked by their antiviruses, so I decided to turn off my windows defender firewall and then the EA app would let me log in again. Why would the app need to bypass my firewall to run? That's kinda sketchy to me tbh. Any explanation to this?