Very slow ERA5 download

I am trying to download relative humidity over a small area on a pressure level basis for several years separately. It was working great during the weekend (3-6 January), each request took around 10 minutes. But since Tuesday 7 January the requests are taking several hours to complete, and I am also having connection issues like:

Recovering from HTTP error [500 Internal Server Error], attemps 1 of 500
Retrying in 120 seconds

Is there some issue with the service or is my user just getting low priority for some reason?

My requests look like this:

import cdsapi

dataset = "reanalysis-era5-pressure-levels"
request = {
    "product_type": ["reanalysis"],
    "variable": ["relative_humidity"],
    "year": ["2018"],
    "month": [
        "01", "02", "03",
        "04", "05", "06",
        "07", "08", "09",
        "10", "11", "12"
    ],
    "day": [
        "01", "02", "03",
        "04", "05", "06",
        "07", "08", "09",
        "10", "11", "12",
        "13", "14", "15",
        "16", "17", "18",
        "19", "20", "21",
        "22", "23", "24",
        "25", "26", "27",
        "28", "29", "30",
        "31"
    ],
    "time": [
        "00:00", "01:00", "02:00",
        "03:00", "04:00", "05:00",
        "06:00", "07:00", "08:00",
        "09:00", "10:00", "11:00",
        "12:00", "13:00", "14:00",
        "15:00", "16:00", "17:00",
        "18:00", "19:00", "20:00",
        "21:00", "22:00", "23:00"
    ],
    "pressure_level": ["550"],
    "data_format": "netcdf",
    "download_format": "unarchived",
    "area": [54.5, 11, 51, 16.75]
}

client = cdsapi.Client()
client.retrieve(dataset, request).download()

Hi,

No, the same thing is happening to me and this started happening right after the switch from the “cds-beta” to “cds” url on the 7th.

Cheers
Kevin