I spoke this morning to the UK based ESET customer service. At first I was told that the problem must be with me as up until that time they had heard nothing from other customers about this update problem. After I pointed to these posts in the forum he said to hole while he looked into this. On return I was told that yes there is a problem because of a large update. He also said that it WAS NOT GOOD PRACTICE to enforce an update by keeping pressing the manual update button until it happened. This would just make things worse with the server getting even more busy. After I said that I would not be happy about falling behind with the sugniture files he said that IT REALLY DOESN'T MATTER IF YOU DO NOT HAVE THE LATEST SIGNITURES. ALL WILL BE WELL and things will get back to normal over the next few days.
I must say that this all seems rather off hand from a top paid for protection company. Just a thought though, in this case could it be that even if the signitures are not up to date, as long as you are online, will the cloud have all the latest protection anyway?