There is an ongoing outage on the primary CPAN mirror. It is possible to work around the issue by using MetaCPAN as a mirror.

2009-11-21

        * Fixed 
            http://rt.cpan.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=43938
            http://rt.cpan.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=39140
            http://rt.cpan.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=33533
            Which are all really the same issue.

2001-08-12  Piers Cawley  <pdcawley@iterative-software.com>

	* Initial release. Everthing working as documented, I think.  Now
	to find out if I'm right, and if what's documented is enough for
	people