I am also going through same problem. Amazing fact is that on several occassions everything worked fine. But most of the time I get error code wheneve request is made for external API.
Most probably this issue arises because of the webhosting company, it is quite common with people who are hosted on shared hosting.
Most of the time we get very high promises at very low price, from these hosting companies, they claim that everything is unlimited but they compensate the unlimited options by limiting the performance of the shared hosting server by using limiting parameters in their PHP. The host I am using is not even allowing me to see the PHP configuration so that I can find out what exactly is happening with my blog.
Although they claim that they allow custom php.ini but even that is not working.
I tried the core plugin and found that php http extension is not available.
Is this the reason because of which I am getting error in akismet and http: time out error when I try to install new plugins or themes in my wordpress blog (version 2.8.4), I am also not able to install the update of word press 2.5.
