Haha, well, glad it worked out even if the solution was just patience!
That is weird though! With 4 cores and 16 GB of RAM, it really shouldn’t take that long. My guess is it was probably a slow mirror, sometimes the Ubuntu package servers just have a bad day and download speeds tank even if your actual internet is fine.
If it happens again you could try switching to a different mirror in your software sources settings, that usually helps.
I don’t think Ubuntu has CDN-aware mirrors. But Debian, Arch and Kali do.
Also see: