Whenever I want to play online, I have to log in at least 20 times to play, and this can be quite annoying. Just imagine this. You just put in your username, and password a million times, and it says connection timeout. Then when you finally get online, you have to whole thing ruined by some troll, sudden death glitch or a lagger. It has gotten so bad that i had to copy and paste my password. I have the 1981 version. I saw a recent post that was locked, but it did not answer my question, because it appears to have nothing to do with the servers being down.

Connection timeout: You may not have a strong enough internet connection to play online mode right now.

FAQ Version:
Q. My connection is timing out and I can't log in!

A. The server is either under maintenance or over capacity. This will improve over time; MGN is still in beta so we're making improvements constantly. As stated above, updates usually occur around 11PM - 2AM EST nightly.
Alternatively, you could be getting this error consistently if your connection is too slow to play Online Mode.

Source: viewtopic.php?f=54&t=39472