This is not related to an update of Awesome Miner. Etherchain recently introduced CloudFlare DDOS protection on their site, causing some issues with requesting information outside a web browser. The latest Awesome Miner development version should resolve this.

To get access to development versions, open the Options dialog in Awesome Miner. In the General section, enable Check for development versions. Then go to the Menu and click Check for updates.

This change will also be included in Awesome Miner 5.5.