Is there a way to detect the status of the Esri world imagery basemap service programmatically prior to opening an MXD?

We have a web application that programmatically exports an MXD to a PDF. In this MXD, we have Esri’s world imagery service added in one of the dataframes. However, when the imagery service is down or very slow, it prevents the MXD from opening and/or exporting. It’s the same behavior if you try to open the MXD manually as well. If the imagery service is down, the MXD simply hangs up or stalls out when you try to open.

So what I want to do is somehow test the status of the imagery service in Python or JavaScript prior to running the MXD export step. If the imagery service is ok, then proceed. If the imagery service is down or slow, then switch to a different imagery service etc. Any ideas?