I noticed my work blocked certain packages, possibly based on the name, or throttling, whatever. At home they worked fine. You'll have to get around your proxy since the error that you're getting back is the indication that the package is not loading. The NPM status page is where to go to make sure npm is still serving up packages, so you had that right.
Since it was the entire fetch that failed, I would guess that's your main issue (access via proxy).
Here is more on NPM and proxy issues: https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/2119
and how one person fixed it: "message failed to fetch from registry" while trying to install any module
If you can't access the registry (NPM down), then you could also try the direct IP approach: NPM fetch failed