No blocks are being minted so transactions to/from an exchange won't work anyway.

Difficulty is at 26.53574592 and will stay that way for nearly another 200 blocks (difficulty isn't adjusted per block). Looks like there was a large difficulty adjustment, making blocks too hard to find. A bad situation for sure, made worse as more miners give up, and then the chances of the network finding a block become even less probable.

We're supposed to be generating one block per minute - so far over 44000 minutes have passed without a block being found.

It's late here so I may be miscalculating, but I believe that at current difficulty you'd need just under 2000MH/s to get the network back to minting one block per minute. Is that going to happen? Maybe in a year or two when the standard scrypt ASIC is measured in 100's of MH, or GH... but for now, you'd probably need 500+ average miners to all jump on the coin simultaneously to get the network moving again.