symantec updates

2 of our clients have managed to get corrupt symantec antivirus definitions which means the services stop. As the services are stopped I am unable to update them with the console and I've disabled liveupdate. Unfortunately the symantec.com websites are unavailable (and so was msn search) (even though they are using the akamai network to protect against ddos). In the end I used the ftp service at ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/english_us_canada/antivirus_definitions/norton_antivirus/ to download the definitions onto the local pc.
Having said all that I spent about an hour trying various things to fix the client but in the end gave up. I've now uninstalled the software and moved across to our new corporate mcafee software instead. I'm not saying this is any better (I doubt it) but we'll see....
As I write this msn search and symantec are now available again.