On our site we run a few different scripts for various sites (uploading to amazon s3, data from chartbeat, script to count twitter followers) and all of them just stop working from time to time. They work most days, but then some days (like today) they all just stop working.

This simple script to get follower count into PHP

$url = "http://twitter.com/users/show/username";
$response = file_get_contents ( $url );
$t_profile = new SimpleXMLElement ( $response );
$count = $t_profile->followers_count;

Just sits there for a couple minutes, then finally spits out an error that says "Couldn't resolve host". Any script we use for an external site gives us this error. I'm not really sure where to check what's blocking these connections all of a sudden, and why it seems to work most times, then doesn't for a day or so, then works again.

Any tips?

Update: Contents of resolv.conf

search 147.225.210.rdns.ubiquityservers.com
nameserver 72.37.224.5
nameserver 72.37.224.6