Waiting for the updates to finish is there by design to not break systems. Latest unattended-upgrades (0.99 and up) perform the updates in small package sets and shutdown can gracefully stop the update process when - between installing the small package sets - the is in consistent state.
In case a single package update such as mysql's takes very long time in itself the shutdown process should wait for it but I suspect in your case there were several other updates queued and performed together. ** Changed in: unattended-upgrades (Ubuntu) Status: New => Fix Released ** Changed in: unattended-upgrades (Ubuntu) Status: Fix Released => Won't Fix -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Touch seeded packages, which is subscribed to unattended-upgrades in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1766797 Title: 'Shutdown' does not shutdown the computer immediately Status in unattended-upgrades package in Ubuntu: Won't Fix Bug description: I initiated the shutdown and instead of shutting down the machine, OS performed an unattended upgrade of mysql server, which took more than 10 minutes. Shutdown should shut the machine down immediately. This is very bad user experience. To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unattended-upgrades/+bug/1766797/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~touch-packages Post to : touch-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~touch-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp