@olivierlambert Sorry for the noise. The issue turned out to be a DNS issue. The IT guys nightmare is when a client says "I didn't touch it"! Ha! well, I didn't! Yet somehow DNS stopped working during the update and left the host and xoa in a strange state and of course NTP could not update. I fixed the resolve.conf and 99 patches showed up in the pool. I will install those after hours and I hope all will be well after that.
Thank you for the response.