error code 0x8007274c

So what is going on?  All my services except IMAP email are working.  The email occasionally connects.  It started early 12/7/2016 and since then my several accounts have only succeeded sync on MS Office Professional 2010 about 2 or three times (in ~36 hours).  My phone (iPhone7) is working a little better, but still big delays.  This happened about 2 years ago when they first rolled out IMAP and failed to build out for the load.  It took them over 6 months to fix it that time.  Why am I not surprised?

All COX is saying about it at this point...

"We are currently experiencing intermittent problems affecting some customers' Email service. You may experience error messages when accessing, reading or retrieving email, or using other email features. You can access email via our Webmail service.

I have no idea what is going on, but it looks like Pop.cox.net and Imap.cox.net are no longer hosted on Cox's network. My guess is Cox's own firewall is causing problems between Cox and rackspace.net. I wonder if it's the same problem that causes this forum to randomly not work. 

Could a moderator confirm if this is normal? Should a tracert to pop.cox.net lead to a non Cox IP? Did someone hijack Cox's email server? 

Tracing route to pop.cox.net [146.20.147.245]