Facetime does not activate, even the facetime preferences option is not available
My facetime was working fine until recently it asked for a login and this time when I did login with my Apple id, it prompted for email verification. However it is not able to complete the verification and keeps giving the following error message : Could not verify the email address. Please check your network connection and try again.
I have checked the support forums and they all point towards preferences. Problem is that the preferences option for face time is grayed out and I am not able to use them.
Any suggestions what could be wrong ?
MacBook Pro (13-inch Early 2011), Mac OS X (10.7.3)