Yes, it usually does, and they haven't changed any settings that I can see, but it doesn't allow me to connect to ANY IRC servers, i've tried about 30 different ones.
I'm using a VPN that is using PPTP (MMPE) and it seems that on all Irc servers, they are refusing the connection, or it simply times out after about 15 secs of trying to connect, i'm tried using different IRC clients, but none seem to work.