I've had similar happen if melpa was unavailable - were you able to hit it via web browser or telnet/netcat when experiencing the issue?

@m131 I can open the main page in the browser but my emacs is still stuck. All these work in the browser: • https://melpa.org/#/ • https://elpa.gnu.org/ • https://elpa.nongnu.org/ I captured tcpdump for the host http://melpa.org but it's big and hard to make sense of, especially since it's https.

Now it actually looks like it works, it's just the minibuffer that's frozen and misleading - further discussion here: https://clojurians.slack.com/archives/C09C8GRLY/p1646898926240989?thread_ts=1646814584.636759&cid=C09C8GRLY