Claeyt wrote: We had an att station blow up here during the big storm this last week and the internet's been wonky all week for a bunch of people.
Here's your answer. Any time you have problems like this, it can take time to get them completely resolved. There's nothing anyone can do about it, either, other than your service provider.
When in doubt about whether you're getting a connection or not, open a console window and ping the server. If there's connection problems, you're going to either not connect or get ridiculously large numbers in the relay times.