I’m beginning to think you may be running into this security system:
It blocks most kinds of API access, which could also block your radio app.
Although then I’m more surprised it worked before and not anymore now, because this security system should block API access anyways.
Web traffic and traceroute traffic is not the same. It’s trivial to block one but not the other. Traceroutes and pings not working is only an issue if they are supposed to be working. And with our network: those not working is by design.
We indeed have a filter on “it”, with “it” being the traceroutes and pings to our servers. I told you as much. Anyone with a moderate understanding of networking can verify that what I’m saying is possible, which is what your network guy did.
The one hop with high latency is again not an issue. The latency of a router is often higher than the actual overhead on a connection go through it. If I ping my home router I also get much worse results than if I ping another computer attached to that router. Why? Because routers are optimized to route traffic, not respond to traffic. Routers use purpose built chips to route traffic quickly, but pings are handled by software.
The fact that in the same traceroute the hop after the slow hop shows much lower latency proves this. If the router was actually slowing down the traffic, then everything after it would be slower, not faster.