Can't access Administer section while drupal.org is down

could be due to the update status.module which connects to drupal.org. I only enable the update status module when I need to check the status of modules. It is not something I allow to run at all times.

I had a similar issue a while back and running update.php fixed it.

Same here. Running 6.10 on LAMP, I experienced an inability to use the administrative side of things. I do have the status update module turned on.

Luckily for me it was only 20mins later that Drupal.org came back online.

Module should give a time out message rather than actually timing out...

Any updates on this from anybody?

Sounds directly related to (if not actually duplicate with) #319486: Fetched update informations at every cron. update.module shouldn't be attempting to fetch updates on every load of admin/* -- that only happens in cases where the {cache_update} table isn't working correctly (e.g. you have memcache and it's not specially configured, you've set the [sic] "minimum" cache lifetime, etc).

However, this isn't duplicate with #319486 because if d.o is down, it'd be nice if update.module had a nicer way to fail than just hanging when it does need to fetch available update data...

Oh, but this is directly duplicate with #414820: Unavailable drupal.org leads to crashed cron. ;)

This is duplicate with #243253: Update status module can cause white screen if the check for updates takes too long in fact...