That's one of the things I've been thinking of. I'm from a country that shall remain unnamed (not American), and the internet connection has been, shall we say, not flawless for as long as I remember. I didn't immediately draw a connection to that as I am so used to that problem (and as the same problem had not happened before this last maintenance). But it could be.
The other thing I can imagine, and the one that is my primary theory, is a difference on browsers. I base this on my experience that sometimes when one game element doesn't work in one browser, I can use it in another until it gets properly dealt with. (For example, once for a day I could only use my garden in Firefox. But that was a while ago, I forget when.) So the first thing I tried is to play the game in different browsers. One browser I am unwilling to use though, for my own reasons, is Chrome; so maybe it was working in Chrome long before other browsers. Is that what you use?