While the timing with the copy.fail patches mentioned by a few comments here seems suspicious indeed, I have seen this repeating over the last few weeks: packages.ubuntu.com was hardly reachable on some days, causing apt-get to take forever to update the system. They have been struggling hard recently, it seems.
Best of luck to the people having to deal with this mess on a holiday!
We are so broken as society ddos'n ubuntu is now a thing.
This seems to be pretty targeted, and with the services affected like livepatch and such this could indeed be an actor DDoSing to avoid patches rolling out for copy.fail
Tinfoil hat mode: a competitor wants to exploit copy.fail on some ubuntu servers, and is DDoSing canonical so that they can't update and thus patch the vuln
If you can access AF_ALG on a server you don't need to do shenanigans like that. It's much easier to just find another bug and exploit that one instead.<p>The copy.fail website is very silly, it is not a special bug. If anyone gets compromised by that vuln their node architecture was broken anyway, patching copy.fail doesn't help.
Double tinfoil hat mode: an attacker learned of my plan to finally update my personal computer out of 20.04 today and is DDoSing canonical so I can't do that and I remain vulnerable to the backdoors they've found.<p>The plot thickens...
why a competitor? Criminals, secret services, country adversaries...
s/competitor/intelligence services/
Seems reasonable to assume it's something to do with the recently publicized exploits. More likely, this could be an extortion attempt by criminals rather than a competitor.
Noticed it because snap didn't work, snap has its own status page just fyi: <a href="https://status.snapcraft.io/" rel="nofollow">https://status.snapcraft.io/</a>
I like to imagine it's returning a 500 error response asking you to email rhonda@ubuntu.com