HTTP Error when trying to download MNIST data
I am using Google Colab for training a LeNet-300-100 fully-connected neural network on MNIST using Python3 and PyTorch 1.8.
To apply the transformations and download the MNIST dataset, the following code is being used:
# MNIST dataset statistics:
# mean = tensor([0.1307]) &amp; std dev = tensor([0.3081])
mean = np.array([0.1307])
std_dev = np.array([0.3081])

transforms_apply = transforms.Compose([
    transforms.ToTensor(),
    transforms.Normalize(mean = mean, std = std_dev)
    ])

which gives the error:

Downloading
http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/mnist/train-images-idx3-ubyte.gz to
./data/MNIST/raw/train-images-idx3-ubyte.gz
--------------------------------------------------------------------------- HTTPError                                 Traceback (most recent call
last)  in ()
2 train_dataset = torchvision.datasets.MNIST(
3         root = './data', train = True,
----&gt; 4         transform = transforms_apply, download = True
5         )
6
11 frames /usr/lib/python3.7/urllib/request.py in
http_error_default(self, req, fp, code, msg, hdrs)
647 class HTTPDefaultErrorHandler(BaseHandler):
648     def http_error_default(self, req, fp, code, msg, hdrs):
--&gt; 649         raise HTTPError(req.full_url, code, msg, hdrs, fp)
650
651 class HTTPRedirectHandler(BaseHandler):
HTTPError: HTTP Error 503: Service Unavailable

What's wrong?

I was having the same 503 error and this worked for me
!wget www.di.ens.fr/~lelarge/MNIST.tar.gz
!tar -zxvf MNIST.tar.gz

from torchvision.datasets import MNIST
from torchvision import transforms

train_set = MNIST('./', download=True,
transform=transforms.Compose([
transforms.ToTensor(),
]), train=True)


test_set = MNIST('./', download=True,
transform=transforms.Compose([
transforms.ToTensor(),
]), train=False)

