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!
The point of coincidental timing with copy.fail patches is that by DDoSing an upgrade mechanism for one of most popular distributions, you extend the time window certain systems remain vulnerable in order to exploit them.
