Showing the actual tracerotue would help.
When you say it failed after 30 hops, my assumption is that it didn't pass through 30 different routers. Rather the trace stopped progressing much earlier.
What is the last router to respond in the traceroute? ...and is that router part of your ISP or is it somewhere out in the Internets?
If I do a traceroute on
slashdot.org, it succeeds, but if I do a traceroute on the ip you gave me, it fails at hop 14 at some router owned by savvis:
If I do an nslookup on
slashdot.org, I get an ip different from the one you listed: 216.105.38.15 and that works fine.
So my guess is that this could be dns related. Perhaps a server changed and it takes time for the old dns entry to flush (doens't really explain why this seems to be taking longer than ~10 minutes though) ....or the dns entry is set to round robin to different ip's and you just got the luck of the draw on one of your pc's that points to a server which is having issues.