I'm testing the makeTxDbFromBiomart function, and I'm noticing that it seems to encounter an error, but only on the current version of Ensembl (85). Running it on version 84 works just fine. Is there a problem with the current Ensembl version's Biomart server, or the biomaRt package, or something else?

> txdb <- makeTxDbFromBiomart()
Download and preprocess the 'transcripts' data frame ... OK
Download and preprocess the 'chrominfo' data frame ... OK
Download and preprocess the 'splicings' data frame ... Error in value[[3L]](cond) :
  Request to BioMart web service failed. Verify if you are still connected to the internet.  Alternatively the BioMart web service is temporarily down.
> traceback()
9: stop("Request to BioMart web service failed. Verify if you are still connected to the internet.  Alternatively the BioMart web service is temporarily down.")
8: value[[3L]](cond)
7: tryCatchOne(expr, names, parentenv, handlers[[1L]])
6: tryCatchList(expr, classes, parentenv, handlers)
5: tryCatch(postForm(paste(martHost(mart), "?", sep = ""), query = xmlQuery),
       error = function(e) {
           stop("Request to BioMart web service failed. Verify if you are still connected to the internet.  Alternatively the BioMart web service is temporarily down.")
       })
4: getBM(attributes, filters = bm_filters, values = bm_values, ...)
3: .getBM2(attributes, filter, mart = mart, bmHeader = FALSE)
2: .makeBiomartSplicings(filter, mart, transcripts_tx_id, recognized_attribs,
       id_prefix = id_prefix)
1: makeTxDbFromBiomart()

> makeTxDbFromBiomart(host="e84.ensembl.org")
Download and preprocess the 'transcripts' data frame ... OK
Download and preprocess the 'chrominfo' data frame ... OK
Download and preprocess the 'splicings' data frame ... OK
Download and preprocess the 'genes' data frame ... OK
Prepare the 'metadata' data frame ... OK
Make the TxDb object ... OK
> sessionInfo()
R version 3.3.1 (2016-06-21)
Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit)
Running under: Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS

locale:
 [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C
 [3] LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8        LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8
 [5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8    LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8
 [7] LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NAME=C
 [9] LC_ADDRESS=C               LC_TELEPHONE=C
[11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C

attached base packages:
[1] grDevices datasets  parallel  graphics  stats4    stats     utils
[8] methods   base

other attached packages:
 [1] GenomicFeatures_1.24.5 AnnotationDbi_1.34.4   Biobase_2.32.0
 [4] GenomicRanges_1.24.2   GenomeInfoDb_1.8.3     openxlsx_3.0.0
 [7] magrittr_1.5           dplyr_0.5.0            foreach_1.4.3
[10] plyr_1.8.4             stringr_1.0.0          IRanges_2.6.1
[13] ggplot2_2.1.0          S4Vectors_0.10.2       BiocGenerics_0.18.0
[16] BiocInstaller_1.22.3

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] Rcpp_0.12.6                XVector_0.12.1
 [3] bitops_1.0-6               iterators_1.0.8
 [5] tools_3.3.1                zlibbioc_1.18.0
 [7] biomaRt_2.28.0             RSQLite_1.0.0
 [9] tibble_1.1                 gtable_0.2.0
[11] DBI_0.4-1                  rtracklayer_1.32.2
[13] Biostrings_2.40.2          grid_3.3.1
[15] R6_2.1.2                   BiocParallel_1.6.4
[17] XML_3.98-1.4               GenomicAlignments_1.8.4
[19] scales_0.4.0               Rsamtools_1.24.0
[21] codetools_0.2-14           SummarizedExperiment_1.2.3
[23] assertthat_0.1             colorspace_1.2-6
[25] stringi_1.1.1              RCurl_1.95-4.8
[27] munsell_0.4.3

Apparently this was a transient server issue that seems to have resolved itself.