Yeah, how Ubuntu is supposed to be noob friendly and continues to be recommended blows my mind. Seems like every stupid app you want to install needs you to add a ppa that is almost guaranteed to break on the next major update. And ugh snaps …
This could be a long shot, but since your instance is running on a .zip TLD it could be blocked at a webserver level (the whole .zip TLD not your instance specifically) like a lot of admins did when they were launched.
John Oliver did a great show on chocolate around Halloween time. It showed just how much child labor goes into producing chocolate for the world, when almost no one really spends any time thinking about where it comes from.