Ubuntu archive server timeout when I try to download

Question

I have a Dockerfile and inside I Have to run:

RUN apt update && DEBIAN_FRONTEND="noninteractive" apt-get -y install tzdata

Issue is that I get next message:

Failed to fetch http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/bionic/InRelease Connection failed [IP: 185.125.190.83 80] Some index files failed to download. They have been ignored, or old ones used instead.

I tried to troubleshoot from terminal: curl -v 185.125.190.83

but I get:

curl -v 185.125.190.83

• Rebuilt URL to: 185.125.190.83/
• Trying 185.125.190.83...
• Connected to 185.125.190.83 (185.125.190.83) port 80 (#0)

GET / HTTP/1.1 Host: 185.125.190.83 User-Agent: curl/7.47.0 Accept: / < HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently < Date: Thu, 29 May 2025 08:55:28 GMT < Server: Apache/2.4.52 (Ubuntu) < Location: http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/ < Content-Length: 314 < Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 < 301 Moved Permanently

Moved Permanently

The document has moved here.

---

Apache/2.4.52 (Ubuntu) Server at 185.125.190.83 Port 80 * Connection #0 to host 185.125.190.83 left intact

Anyone knows what happened? Are ubuntu servers down or something else?

Answer 1

It seems there is currently an ongoing issue with http ubuntu repositories (via port 80). See the status at https://status.canonical.com/

I worked around this issue by switching archive URL that fails from http with https. Something like this:

sudo sed -i 's|http://archive.ubuntu.com|https://archive.ubuntu.com|g' /etc/apt/sources.list

Unfortunately, doing the same for security.ubuntu.com didn't seem to work, as the HTTPS endpoint is unreachable for me right now... Fortunately, it seems to come back from time to time... maybe it's just flaky and it does work, not sure

Answer 2

Login to a shell on the docker container and then you can test:- docker run -it --rm ubuntu:bionic bash . Once in the shell, you can run route to see if the default route is setup correctly and that you can ping the address