It seems that services.gradle.org breaks CI builds by returning HTTP 200 for “No Files found.” By doing so intermediate caches like artifactory store this HTML-page instead of continuing the search at other repositories.
Can you give an example URL please.
The URL where I detected this problem was http://services.gradle.org/distributions/javax/jnlp/jnlp/1.6.0 - in our project there is a dependency to jnlp and the gradle-based CI build tries to fetch the pom from the URL above. I think that service.gradle.org should reply with a HTTP Status 404 and not with 200 in this case.
Fixed. Thanks for the report.