I've got this issue on Digital Ocean VM with Ubuntu 20.04. Apparently, it started happening after minor upgrade via apt-get update / apt-get upgrade.
Full text of error:
And network did not start at all. In console I was able to see that eth0 is active but had no IP. I think this issue is related with some cloud-init bugs triggered by upgrade.
I was able to fix it short term via KVM / recovery console by trying sudo ifdown eth0 and then sudo ifup eth0 but it failed again after reboot.
As long term fix I've disabled cloud-init via special file:
touch /etc/cloud/cloud-init.disabled
Then it fixed network configuration but did not address 2 minute delay before ssh start.