It could just be a temporary outage, but my guess is that its support has been discontinued.
That can lead to a rather long wait while the client figures out there is nothing at the other end.
Assuming this isn't a short term outage, one can avoid the long wait by redirecting your hosts file to point it to your local machine which will time out quickly - but you will still get the dialog telling you to "Try Another Nick" and chat service won't be available.
For windows (at least as of Win7), that's usually in Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts.
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0.0.0.0 nwmaster.bioware.com # master server is no more
0.0.0.0 peerchat.gamespy.com # seems to have gone down 26-Jul-2014
Wouldn't recommend doing this if you are uncomfortable with modifying system files. Keep a backup of the original version in case something goes wrong.
I searched earlier for details but didn't really see anything which is why I'm not entirely sure what the status is. I had to do a little detective work locally to see what the client was trying to access to work it out.
