I'm having the exact same problem except for I actually logged out, made breakfast, and then got the blank character screen every time I've tried logging in for the last two hours (followed by an error 2002 message if you wait a bit).

I can only access JP servers for some reason now.

Tried three different PCs, two different networks, wireless/wired, restarted PCs and routers, disabled antivirus and firewall, and....nothing helps.

I see a number of others are also having that problem after getting disconnected in some other threads since the 2.16 update.

There went my chance to wrap up yesterday's dailies T-T