gtrendsR recently became slow?

Question

We have a production system calling gtrendsR::gtrends() which typically returns in less than an second. Now we are getting ~ one minute response time. Example:

library(gtrendsR)  ## Version 1.4.0
system.time(ret_gt <- gtrendsR::gtrends("skinny jeans", geo = "US", 
                                 time = "today+5-y", category = 997))
  #  user  system elapsed 
  # 0.404   0.016  56.897 

Am I missing something?