Just called the ISP (Deutsche Telekom ) and before I even got to talk to an agent, there was some message that they are aware that their DSL is currently having problems - I still talked to an agent and she said there are some "problems with the backbone". I guess that must be the reason, then. Hope they somehow manage to fix it - if I didn't have the possibility to just go through my employer's VPN, I'd be royally pissed right now! What if I was running a business on this DSL account - the problem has already been there for 24 h now and they have not fixed it... grrrrr .

But thanks again for the advice .