Big Admin Slowdown leads to issue with wp-cron

Recently this site has had a disastrous slowdown particularly in the dashboard. Site health reports that

The scheduled event, litespeed_task_imgoptm_pull, failed to run. Your site still works, but this may indicate that scheduling posts or automated updates may not work as intended.

and also

The REST API request failed due to an error.
Error: cURL error 28: Operation timed out after 10001 milliseconds with 0 bytes received (http_request_failed)

The web host says the slowdown has to do with extra load being created by cron.php and that a cron task was added incorrectly and is timing out

I installed the wp-crontrol plugin and indeed it shows that no cron jobs have run for 1 week and three days which coincides with the start of the issue

In addition it shows this error

cURL error 28: Operation timed out after 3001 milliseconds with 0 bytes received

Could someone help me trouble shoot this- I m at a los as to where to begin sorting this through

Thanks

The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]