A note, since it’s not explicitly stated earlier in the thread: The nameservers for ascend4.org are ns[123].easyclouddns.net. To find out the IP address for one of those nameservers, it’s necessary to contact the easyclouddns’ nameservers. All my queries for dig ns easyclouddns.net timeout, so it’s not possible to directly find out the names of easyclouddns’ nameservers. However, whois reveals that easyclouddns is registered with NetRegistry, so I’m assuming their nameservers are ns[123].netregistry.net.
It does look like NetRegistry is having a rather bad outage at the moment: https://twitter.com/netregistry/status/852317642903834625. That’s probably the cause of all these timeouts. I’m afraid the best advice I can offer you at the moment is to change your nameservers away from easyclouddns.net, at least for now.