I was playing FE earlier this afternoon, went and did other things for a while, and then came back and got this error 4x in a row on launching the game. Note that I'm posting this message from the same computer, so I clearly have 'net access; also, this is the same computer from which I have played all my many hours of FE, so it's clearly not a firewall issue (though I did double-check to be sure, and, yes, it's on the exception list for Windows Firewall). So...are your servers down or something?