Right now, the Web is experiencing the largest brute force attack in history. The attack is targeting Web sites running WordPress. FTM isn't using WordPress (obviously), but it's possible some WordPress sites live in the same data center and use the same database servers we're using, which would account for the strange intermittent slowdowns.
I've been noticing something similar over the past few days when trying to access various sites.*
Since I'm using dial-up access to the internet (with data transfer rates of 3-6 KB/s), the problem is magnified. When I checked with tech support for one of the dial-up ISPs I use, the tech freaked out, watching signals being bounced around from one coast to the other and everywhere in between. At the time he had no explanation for such. This might be that.
* My iMac's Activity Monitor (10.7.4) registers some really bizarre activity on such sites — for example, CPU activity related to Firefox seems to go berserk, sometimes indicating 70-80% user usage, with occasional bumps up to 110% user usage (if that were even possible). User usage is normally in the 10%-20% range.
