Forum Flakiness

I've been having trouble accessing the CoH forums on and off for the last three days. I try to connect as usual, but after it thinks about it for a while...a long while...I finally get the standard "cannot connect" error. It always happens during the day at work, but I don't think it's work per se, since I've been happily posting from work for years.

I wasn't able to connect during at all on Monday during the work day, and both yesterday and today there have been extended periods where I couldn't open the forums.

Has anyone else had this problem?

New Issue issues have pushed the original thread off the front page for me.

UPDATE! I had the same problem briefly when I first fired up the forums this morning. I ran a tracert, first to cityofheroes.com and then to boards.cityofheroes.com, (when one goes they both do, IME) and sometime between the two the problem cleared up. Here's the output:

H:\>tracert cityofheroes.com
Tracing route to cityofheroes.com [64.25.35.107]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 10.103.101.253
2 3 ms 3 ms 5 ms 172.16.101.201
3 1 ms 2 ms 1 ms host-198-7-224-189.oshean.org [198.7.224.189]
4 1 ms 2 ms 1 ms host-198-7-255-5.oshean.org [198.7.255.5]
5 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms te4-4.ccr01.pvd01.atlas.cogentco.com [38.103.240.49]
6 31 ms 25 ms 26 ms te0-4-0-5.ccr22.bos01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.24.237]
7 26 ms 25 ms 25 ms te0-4-0-7.ccr22.ord01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.43.205]
8 38 ms 38 ms 38 ms te0-4-0-5.ccr22.mci01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.45.149]
9 48 ms 52 ms 48 ms te3-4.ccr02.dfw01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.2.229]
10 48 ms 48 ms 48 ms te4-3.ccr02.dfw03.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.6.54]
11 48 ms 48 ms 48 ms 192.205.36.181
12 51 ms 51 ms 51 ms cr2.dlstx.ip.att.net [12.122.138.106]
13 136 ms 86 ms 50 ms cr81.ftwtx.ip.att.net [12.122.100.69]
14 50 ms 50 ms 54 ms cr82.ftwtx.ip.att.net [12.122.80.10]
15 49 ms 49 ms 49 ms 12.122.153.193
16 56 ms 56 ms 56 ms 12.249.201.12
17 56 ms 56 ms 56 ms cityofheroes.com [64.25.35.107]
Trace complete.

H:\>tracert boards.cityofheroes.com
Tracing route to coh103.gtm.cityofheroes.com [64.25.35.208]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 10.103.101.253
2 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 172.16.101.201
3 1 ms 2 ms 4 ms host-198-7-224-189.oshean.org [198.7.224.189]
4 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms host-198-7-255-5.oshean.org [198.7.255.5]
5 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms te4-4.ccr01.pvd01.atlas.cogentco.com [38.103.240.49]
6 25 ms 25 ms 26 ms te0-4-0-5.ccr22.bos01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.24.237]
7 26 ms 25 ms 25 ms te0-5-0-5.ccr22.ord01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.43.73]
8 38 ms 37 ms 39 ms te0-3-0-3.ccr22.mci01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.6.214]
9 48 ms 48 ms 60 ms te3-4.ccr02.dfw01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.2.229]
10 48 ms 51 ms 49 ms te7-3.ccr02.dfw03.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.6.62]
11 48 ms 48 ms 48 ms 192.205.36.177
12 50 ms 51 ms 50 ms cr2.dlstx.ip.att.net [12.122.138.106]
13 50 ms 50 ms 52 ms cr81.ftwtx.ip.att.net [12.122.100.69]
14 51 ms 52 ms 58 ms cr82.ftwtx.ip.att.net [12.122.80.10]
15 49 ms 49 ms 49 ms 12.122.153.193
16 68 ms 56 ms 56 ms 12.249.201.12
17 56 ms 56 ms 56 ms boards.cityofheroes.com [64.25.35.208]
Trace complete.

I'm a noob at this, but it looks to me like something bad happened at hop 13 on the first run and not on the second. Can anyone enlighten me as to what this means?