Though this outage may be more related to the copy.fail upgrade cycle, it reminds me of a thought I've had recently in respect of agents.

In the UK they have this issue called "TV pickup" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_pickup). TV pickup is where everyone in the UK watching a popular TV show gets up to boil a high-powered tea kettle at the same time on an ad break. This causes a temporary surge in electricity demand and leads to real outages. It was a mystery at first but now is accounted for.

I suspect the global internet is facing an "agent pickup" problem where significant changes (e.g., releases of new frontier models or new package versions) puts unpredictable pressure on arbitrary infrastructure as millions of distributed agents act to address the change simultaneously.

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!

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

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

We are so broken as society ddos'n ubuntu is now a thing.

Noticed it because snap didn't work, snap has its own status page just fyi: https://status.snapcraft.io/

I like to imagine it's returning a 500 error response asking you to email rhonda@ubuntu.com