I saw this type of behaviour a few years ago in the Middle East. In my case it came from a misapplied security filter. A firewall was "modifing" all fetched pages to remove any JavaScript, as a result the XML from ActiveState was being totally destroyed and the symptom was an apparently dead ActiveStates server. In my case no amount of waiting would have made the server work.

The way I proved this to myself was to fetch some of the ActiveState XML pages by hand so that I could see that what was returned was invalid. I was tempted to either grab the XML, edit it to fix the issue and set up a fake PPM server or to beat the supplier around the head. However, I was only behind this badly configured system for a few days, so my final fix was to wait until I could bybass the firewall.