Ovidiu on "smtp email problems"

I'm not sure if this is related to the WP 3.9 upgrade so I thought I'd ask since this only happens on the only site I upgraded to 3.9

This morning I realized it was broken. Not sure hat changed, all I remember are a few mysql updates and openssl updates... Running on a Debian 7 server.

All was working fine for months, now realized it doesn't. Trying to figure out what happend...

If I send via SMTP as usual, through amazon SES, I get this in the logs:

2014-04-19 12:53:10 000000 -- SWIFTMAILER [ERROR] - There was a problem sending with SMTP :
Connection could not be established with host email-smtp.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com [php_network_getaddresses: getaddrinfo failed: Name or service not known #0]

I've googled that error and cannot figure it out.

ping email-smtp.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com
ping: unknown host email-smtp.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com

but telnet email-smtp.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com 587 works.
Any ideas what could be wrong here?