Any firewall or filtering software on the computer? Connecting through a router; with a firewall? System specs? I dunno if the servers are having issues, but they appear to be up as far as the website is reporting. You can also use Klients (
http://www.ryzom.com/data/Klient/chat.players.ee.zip ) to find the current status of a shard (works better than forums for that kind of info).