A similar issue: ionic serve randomly (but not rarely) stops serving. That is, the process in terminal gets just killed.
ionic CLI 1.3.10
Chrome 40.0.2214.111 (64-bit)
OS X 10.10
The error (seen in Chrome’s Developer Tools logs) seems to reside in livereload.js?snipver=1:191. It’s same as in OP:
> WebSocket connection to ‘ws://localhost:35729/livereload’ failed: Error in connection establishment: net::ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED
(This is the only Google result on this error, hence I figured I’d continue the same thread. Apologies if that’s frowned upon.)