I saw a link to a thread on the Maniaplanet forum (the thread will not load) that a bug that is causing TM2 to fail to connect to the master server due to the server timing out has been fixed.
It has not.
I have repeatedly encountered error number 12002 at least four or five times now. There are two possible explanations:
1. Ubisoft is acting like Google (or has been bought by them) and saying they fixed something they didn't.
2. The main server itself (not the connections along the way) is down or otherwise experiencing connection outages.
I am not the only one experiencing this issue, there have thousands of reports of this still occurring all over the internet.