You were always ultimately reaching back to those servers in the US, just not going there directly. That is Bungie here in the US. They are ONLY in the US--no EU footprint. They use cloud servicing around the globe to supplement hosting, but we ALL have to maintain two persistent TCP connections to Bungie--here in the US. The bulk of our game play communications are not over TCP directly to Bungie, but go through cloud support and player direct communications that happen over UDP protocol, which will not show up in something like Task Manager or perhaps even netstat--Windows defaults to only showing TCP unless you use switches to tell it to show UDP. As for the apparent stall after Vegas, it is because Level3 is trying to hand off into Bungie's ISP or directly into their network, and their devices are set to ignore ICMP echo requests, so the trace can't go any further. This is a common option used for various reasons (security, performance, etc.). Bungie locks down most all their IP's like this... they only respond to the proper protocol and port ID they are actively listening for at a given address. So you will not be able to ping/trace to them yourself unless you know the proper addresses. They do not publish them, so will not reveal them here... but they do exist if one knows how to look for them. We often see recurring issues with route instability in the US. Level3/Century Link is routinely involved in some regions. Unfortunately we are not their customers, so it falls to our ISP'S (who have peering arrangements with such third party ISP's) to investigate and act accordingly on our behalf. The trick is getting them to take a closer look for us, and for that we usually need to provide data indicating their may be a problem for them to research. (a side note, Vegas is usually one of Level3's better corridors up to Seattle from the south... going through Texas or Southern California routes are where we more often see issues.) Run the latency test at testmy.net: https://testmy.net/latency Click the icon with the eye on it to run all the tests back to back. Watch what the line graphs are doing. If they are continually spiking really high and you keep getting high deviation numbers, then you may have a latency/jitter problem for your ISP to investigate. Each of the individual test graphs will note the address it tested, so you can look closer at that particular route (run traces and such)... sometimes a certain exchange point is a common denominator they can look at. There is another batch ping test you can run at dslreports.com for extra comparison as well: http://www.dslreports.com/tools/pingtest Yes, I know many of the test locations are a long way away and the core latency will be too high for the game... what you are testing for is the consistency of the latency. If there is too much jitter or packet loss, the game will boot you. Also need to make sure your local network is in line with Bungie's network guide: https://www.bungie.net/en/Support/Troubleshoot?oid=12915