Minecraft Connection Errors

Question

This is probably on the wrong site, so go ahead and move it if you have to... but I have been getting this same problem for the past week and it's really starting to irritate me. When I try to join my friend's MC server, I get an error saying "Disconnected Took too long to login." I googled the error and found that it could possibly be because the minecraft member authentication servers are down, but I eliminated that possibility by having my friend login to my account. It worked fine for him with the same server.

I also thought that maybe my minecraft client wasn't up to date with the server, so I tried updating my client with the update that the server used(12w07a) but that didn't change anything.

Then, I tried the idea to port forward my router to 25565, but that didn't do anything. My friend said sometimes ISP's(mine is verizon fios) block certain ports from being forwarded. If that's the case, is there any way of getting around it?

So I am not sure what exactly is causing the problem. Anybody have any ideas?