The network is chock full of transactions right now. As I am writing this post there are over 170k transactions which remain unconfirmed, and it has been hovering around this amount for a fairly long time now. The lowest I saw it get to within the past week or so has been around 130k transactions being unconfirmed, followed by another jump up to 190k and then back down to a pretty steady 170k since then. It was like this during the insane pump to close to 20k as well; it crossed 200k unconfirmed transactions on a number of occasions and it was completely filling blocks. Even now they remain completely filled as the network tries to cut down the quantity, at least mostly full anyways.

Switch to something like blockchain.info if you don't want to pay the insane fees, blockchain at least lets you customize those fees.