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 ...