It's not
specific, nor is it specific to you.
Here's a quick and dirty description of network traffic:
Your computer is identified by an Internet Protocol address (IP address.) This address is used to figure out what is close to you (in network terms,) and what needs to be sent through a gateway to get to another machine.
So, let's assume you're at home, and have a browser open to the
website. Your computer will send out a packet to your local gateway. For broadband folks, this will be your firewall/router. Dial-ups, this will be back at your ISP. At the first gateway, aka "hop," the packet will get forwarded to another gateway closer to the destination. This process continues until the packet gets to the router next to
's server, or it gets to 30 hops (by default.) The return packets happen the same way.
Network congestion happens when a link gets more traffic than it can handle. Depending on how the router is configured, some packets may get silently dropped, or they may get returned with an error.
I suspect that some of the major backbone routers are overloaded, and packets are getting dropped. This is probably the worst case. It's actually overloading the server, because the connections are being held open, and retransmitted.
In short, I doubt there's anything that you can do. I doubt there's much that I can do either, except let
's ISP know when I identify a congestion issue.
