Hi there,

a few colleagues and I started running in trouble using the rfishbase package today. Every single command from the package seems to return:

Error in open.connection(con, "rb") :
cannot open the connection to 'https://huggingface.co/api/datasets/cboettig/fishbase/tree/main/data/fb'

In addition: Warning message:
In open.connection(con, "rb") :
URL 'https://huggingface.co/api/datasets/cboettig/fishbase/tree/main/data/fb': status was 'SSL connect error'

We have tried different machines from inside and outside our organisation's network, but the error remains.

My current SessionInfo()

R version 4.5.2 (2025-10-31 ucrt)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64
Running under: Windows 11 x64 (build 26200)

Matrix products: default
LAPACK version 3.12.1

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=English_New Zealand.utf8 LC_CTYPE=English_New Zealand.utf8 LC_MONETARY=English_New Zealand.utf8 LC_NUMERIC=C
[5] LC_TIME=English_New Zealand.utf8

time zone: Pacific/Auckland
tzcode source: internal

attached base packages:
[1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base

other attached packages:
[1] rfishbase_5.0.1

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] R6_2.6.1 tidyselect_1.2.1 magrittr_2.0.3 glue_1.8.0 stringr_1.5.2 tibble_3.3.0 pkgconfig_2.0.3 dplyr_1.1.4 generics_0.1.4
[10] lifecycle_1.0.4 cli_3.6.5 vctrs_0.6.5 compiler_4.5.2 httr_1.4.7 purrr_1.1.0 rstudioapi_0.17.1 tools_4.5.2 curl_7.0.0
[19] pillar_1.11.0 jsonlite_2.0.0 rlang_1.1.6 stringi_1.8.7

Edit: Seems similar to#306. Btw, I can reach the URL through my browser.