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As per The Register [theregister.com], many frustrated users on Reddit and other forums, and my own experiences, accessing Ubuntu's software repositories was very difficult during the weekend. According to the Ubuntu status page [canonical.com], security.ubuntu.com and archive.ubuntu.com began experiencing an outage during the evening (for US time zones) of September 4. Following the initial major outage, both also experienced intermittent periods of maintenance and additional outages that persisted through the weekend. Despite Canonical indicating the outages had been resolved, many users including myself experienced very slow software updates or could not access the servers altogether. From The Register's article:

When is an outage not an outage? According to Canonical's forum, it's when a 36-minute server disruption creates a multi-day backlog that leaves users unable to install or update Ubuntu systems.

Canonical's status page shows that both security.ubuntu.com and archive.ubuntu.com experienced brief issues on September 5 and 7. The incidents appeared short-lived, ending with the reassuring "All components are Operational" message. Case closed, right?

Not exactly. While Canonical's servers came back online quickly, the real problems were just beginning. Users flooded the company's forums throughout the weekend, reporting failed installations and frozen updates. The brief server outages had created a processing backlog that left Ubuntu's repositories effectively broken for days.

"They say the outage was only 36 minutes, but two days later it still isn't working, a frustrated user told The Register yesterday.

Our source wasn't alone. A look at Canonical's forums indicated plenty of users encountering the same issue, prompting terse responses from Canonical representatives who eventaully shut down the discussion.

The Ubuntu Studio Project Leader, Erich Eickmeyer, posted [ubuntu.com]: "We don't need a bunch of 'Can Confirm' and 'me too' posts. Instructions were given as to what needs to happen as 1) a workaround, and 2) what you need to do to get the repos working (you can't)."

There are a large number of Ubuntu mirrors [launchpad.net], many of which seemed to function properly during the outage. Tools like mirrorselect [snapcraft.io] can find the fastest mirror for a user, and GUI users can select a mirror from a dropdown list using the "Software & Updates" tool. However, it's still up to command line users to manually update their Apt sources file to the mirror.

The issue seems to be mostly resolved, though I have not been able to find an official explanation from Canonical about the reason for the extended inaccessibility and slowness of their servers. Transparency would be very welcome to this Ubuntu user, especially to provide authoritative information about whether the issues were due to an attack of some sort.

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