A couple years ago they moved to cloud based/Amazon EC3 servers I believe. They did have some routing issues with Level3 at one point that was pretty widespread but most of that seems to have dissipated. I haven't seen any noticeable lag issues at all from Chicago, IL. Have you compared your bandwidth speed and pings to UO servers? How is your internet connection? If your connection is bad or laggy - it will impact you alone.
On speedtest.net my home connection is showing 12 ms ping, 22 Mbps download and 5.8 Mbps upload speed.