Servers are down, impossible to connect to a match, affects all players

I'm hoping EA treats these forums as a ticket system, seeing as they don't seem to have one for games any more 

This seems to be affecting every player, on every server, globally. I noticed today but I've seen reports going back as far as 2 days, here's what happens normally:
 - You can get into main menu. servers show up on the server selector
 - you can get into the multiplayer menus without issue
 - once you select modes and hit play, server will LOOK like it's doing everything right and connects to a match

Her'es where it breaks
The status bar says "Connecting to match" and plays the sound effect as normal. The game under normal operation would take you immediately from the UI to a loading screen for the actual game lobby

Instead now you remain in the UI menu, seeking a game, the status bar changes to "Finding Players" which is only typically seen when the servers are shagged, it will give a couple 30 second countdowns, and then the status goes back to "Searching for a game", it will do this infinitely 

I did manage to get a game quickly once when i joined US servers (my local is London,)  however after that game all my attempts to get onto those had the same issue 

Now I know that most of these shouldn't work by virtue of the issue being global and affecting other people, but things I tried with no effect:

 - disabling communities with +communities_enabled 0 in the launch options 
 - restarting machine 
 - reinstalling the game (I didn't but a couple other people on steam forums did) 
 -changing servers across the planet to account for geographical targeting (cos it was a factor in the DOS) 
 - tried all different modes except insane FD (cos i didnt think about it with the game open, but other FDs and multiplayer didn't work and the issue is the matchmaking server bit not the game lobby itself anyway,) wasn't able to find a game in coliseum to check after the Connecting part (I did wait) 
 - Tried connecting to private match. The status bar is bigger and has a cancel button for this mode, however it just stays at "Connecting ..." indefinitely until you cancel
 - Tried limiting to single modes (because i limited to LTS & TTDM when i got the one US game and thought it was worth a crack) 

None of it helped 

For ppl reading, the game does have a community server mod called Northstar mod if this keeps up but I really, really don't want to use that because maintaining it on Linux via Proton is this whole big thing and it's an absolute pain in the arse and most EU servers were a bit **bleep** when i played it last anyway

May The Janitor save us all