Ubuntu Users Left Waiting After Canonical’s Servers Take Weekend Off

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.

“I’m trying to install Ubuntu Server 24.04.2 LTS on a machine right now, and I just can’t because it freezes in the middle of the install because it can’t download some of the packages.”

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 eventually shut down the discussion.

The Ubuntu Studio Project Leader, Erich Eickmeyer, posted: “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).”

So there.

The underlying problem was that while the servers themselves recovered quickly, they couldn’t process the accumulated backlog of requests. Users found themselves unable to install fresh Ubuntu systems or download security updates until Monday, September 8. Canonical’s official advice, buried in forum posts, boiled down to “wait it out” until everything synced.

Canonical did not respond to our request for comment, but as one source put it, losing security.ubuntu.com could be a serious issue if millions of systems were unable to download a critical update.

A status page claiming all is well when the customer experience is quite different is becoming all too familiar and frustrating for users.

Uptime percentages that reflect reality might look a little less rosy, though they’d almost certainly cut down on the number of “me too” posts clogging up the forums when the next outage strikes. ®

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