Well thanks for the answers. So far no improvement. Not sure how a transatlantic cable can affect just one site (no problems on other sites, including international ones), but ok.

For now I will stop playing. Regrettable, yet as there is no solution, there is nothing else I can do.I will have to stop after twenty years. It has been fun all these years, so thanks for that. I appreciate the years of fun that I have had on this site.

Well thanks for the answers. So far no improvement. Not sure how a transatlantic cable can affect just one site (no problems on other sites, including international ones), but ok.

For now I will stop playing. Regrettable, yet as there is no solution, there is nothing else I can do.I will have to stop after twenty years. It has been fun all these years, so thanks for that. I appreciate the years of fun that I have had on this site.

You can have problems with just one site depending on what is missing.

The internet more or less works like a bundle of roads without actual maps. At each intersection, you have signposts for which route to take.

Lets assume you want to drive from Amsterdam to Munich. You'll get on the road. In Amsterdam, a sign points to Germany, so you take that route, winding up at an intersection in Eindhoven. Again, you follow the sign to Germany, which now takes you to Cologne. In Cologne, you have a sign "Bavaria", sending you to Frankfurt. Once more "Bavaria" will take you to Nuremberg and, finally, in Nuremberg, they have a sign to Munich.

Now we'll assume there's a bridge out between Eindhoven and Cologne. Eindhoven now has no idea where to send you (they only know that you reach Germany via Cologne), but they know that Denmark is close to Germany. So they send you that way as a best effort. You take a ride up to the North Sea for a ferry port. At the port, they actually realize that you rather wanted to go to Germany, so they won't send you to Copenhagen but rather on a ferry to Hamburg. From there, you'll possibly reach Hannover, Kassel and then Frankfurt from where you can finally resume the original route. You can imagine that is a LOT slower.

The problem here is not so much the bridge, but the folks who set up the signage at Eindhoven. They should have had better alternate routes in place. If they had sent you to Maastricht instead of deviating you through Denmark, you'd have had a much shorter and faster trip. (That route, in turn, might however not be so ideal if you had wanted to go to Hamburg or Berlin in the first place).

In technical terms, each internet node has what is called a routing table. It will look at your destination and then, just based on that destination, send you one node further. If the node it wants to send you to is not reachable, it will use an alternate - and in the worst case, that alternate is a default where all "I don't know better" traffic is sent to. So your request to FunTrivia might first go to London, then to Dublin where a cable is missing. Dublin doesn't know what to do so it will send you right back to a different site in London who would want to use the same cable. Knowing that already failed, that site might then send you to Spain in the hopes of hitting a cable to Mexico. Other sites in the US might send you not via Dublin but via Iceland in the first place, so you'd never notice a problem there. Yes, it is difficult...