Originally Posted by
Gralna
From what I read of here and on reddit, it's to do with a negotiation between one of those hops and AT&T, and they aren't able to publicly disclose the details of the negotiation. My guess, their contract is up for renewal and AT&T wants a lower rate and is hoping people will get upset with NTT and put pressure on them to just agree and sign, meanwhile while the contract is in limbo, hops to that backbone from AT&T have lower priority during high traffic times.
Though what NanaWiloh still stands, at least in regard to topic title of telling SE to change their ISP, no matter what ISP the customer is on, you have to go through NTT backbones to get to XIV servers. In this case you also have to hope your personal ISP has a good deal with NTT, or whoever owns your ISP does. If I had to guess from seeing issues like this cropping up over the last year or so, is that Telecom companies are finally playing their hand after net neutrality was repealed and public noise about it had died down.