Tonight was really bad - I wanted to join my usual server and it read a 9999 ping? All other servers were fine only the one I wanted to log into.
The game said my ping was too high for the server (naturally) and it is a pain in the rear. What is up with this?
Think of “Ping” as a sonar ping (pulse). 999 is the industry standard designate signifying nothing was returned - the pulse did not bounce back. It’s possible 9999 may actually have a different specific meaning although I’ve never seen it or heard about it - the server scanning is absolutely NOT taking 10 seconds - aka 9999ms). My guess would be that whoever decided to use 9999 was being “funny”. In either case it signifies the server returned no data in the allotted time (standardly 999 milliseconds - 1 second) after being asked to do so. It likely but not necessarily, indicates the server is down for whatever reasons.
Something is actually bugged about their ping routines though. You can scan and populate the server list at 11:02:30 (just for example) then reload the game or take any other action which clears the buffer and rescans the servers at 11:03:00 and get entirely different results. Some deviation is expected - (a few percentage points) - but in the FC Launcher’s case it can go from 38 to 804. Which shouldn’t be possible like, at all. Yet with the FC launcher it is quite commonplace. So there’s that too. 
Thank you so much! That makes sense. I can run a computer but no expert. Appreciate the response.
No problem… If you want more detail there’s a Wiki page on the topic here.