You might have seen this login error several times today and in the past, the cause of the ‘took too long to log in’ error is Mojang (Notch’s) server is down, the purpose of this player name authentication server is to deal with client logins and authorisation requests, On minecraftserver.com we use the online-mode=true server.properties flag and every time you connect to our SMP server it performs a call back check with the Minecraft.net authorisation servers to confirm you are indeed who you say you are, this protects our server from players spoofing the player names and gaining access when they should not be able. Many pirate Minecraft servers run with the online-mode=false, this allows users with pirated Minecraft clients to connect to their servers, without ever having brought the game from Mojang. A quick way to verify if Minecraft.net is having issues is to check either Jeb's or Mollstam's twitter feeds as they will normally post about long term issues relating to ‘Can’t connect to Minecraft.net’ issues. Jebs Twitter Feed Mollstams Twitter Feed
