Problems shutting down the raspberry pi

[colinsauze]

Sometimes I have problems shutting down the pi using the shutdown/halt/poweroff/reboot commands (all of which are symlinks to systemctl). Eventually after several minutes they will respond with the error:

Failed to execute operation: Connection timed out It is possible to perform action directly, see discussion of --force --force in man:systemctl(1).

I think systemd is partially shutting down and hanging somewhere in the shutdown process. The only way to force it is to run

sudo systemctl --force --force halt