I experience a lot of long loading times when setting up trades or jumping to and from friends islands and from adv's(to adv's it is fairly normal I reckon), also today I had to send out my explorers and geos 2-3 times before it registered, also to 2 tries before one of my mines were demolished. And before you say it's on my end, it isn't, I have no probs with the other internet games I play.
If memory serves me right, this erratic server behavior is very common during events possibly due to a heavier load on the servers, a server upgrade might be a good solution, But hey... I don't know much about these technical thingymabobs (sorry for using complicated technical terms on you :P).