Hi, an awesome topic for a HW. I can confirm there are some issues on the Ropsten network, transactions are also not going right now. The network seems to be stressed and thus producing the limit of gas per block to be reduced while increasing the cost of transactions making it impossible to cover the gas fees in any block.
So it’s a network issue, use any other network and should work fine, at least until ropsten recovers.
Thanks for the update