Nope, not normal. All of mine were hashing with no issues last night.
Instead of another port, you might put in the second closest server to your location. Just ping them to find the fastest response times.
Thanks, I'll give that a try.
Yeah the different ports are there for getting past upstream network blocks.
So if you can't get at port 3333 at all then you should find at least 80 or 443 would be OK.
However, if the problem is transient, then it may be you aren't using the best node for you as pool1.
As in the first post and the thread topic, there are nodes in the US, UK, Japan, Germany, Singapore and US-East (NYA)
The main US stratum is US-West
So that should make it easy to choose which is closest, then also make a different one (next closest one) pool2
PM me your pool username if you want me to check for you.