You're spot on my friend! After I reinstalled the game and it still wasn't working I decided to close every application running in the background apart from my anti virus and malware it all started to work...

In the effort of finding out which software was causing the problem I opened them back up individually and the final one was Hotspot Shield and bam! ARR launcher came up with that error... I've been using that service for ages while playing ARR with no problems so I will contact them to see if they know anything about it

Out of interest how did you determine that was the problem?

Now to re-update the game (>_<)