While I agree with all of your assessments, this traceroute was being provided to illustrate where traffic *appears* to be stopping when we are seeing the issue. It's intermittent, so some times we can reach the destination hosts (via HTTP, HTTPS, etc.) and sometimes we can't.
When we can reach the destination hosts (via HTTP), the traceroute completes
When we can't reach the destination hosts (via HTTP), the traceroute won't complete and the last hop is the host that I indicated in my previous post (12.118.225.22)