Yeah, US1 and VarDiff should be fine, US2 and US3 are having some trouble... well the servers are fine, but the network is having trouble. I have a trouble ticket open with the DC... it's like only certain ports are being blocked, so it might be a DDoS either with the pool as a target or someone else and the DC has put in some strange filtering... I'll know more soon.
US3 just started working for me again.
Why do people DDoS a mining pool? Inaba does not have controversal politics from what I have seen.
extortion?
Well, there has been a botnet miner just recently, who got his account suspended. Perhaps someone is butthurt.