I created an E2-micro VM instance on GCE, connected via SSH and performed apt update followed by apt upgrade, however the upgrade operation gets frozen at a certain point (screenshot below) everytime I try. Ctrl-Break does not work. I tried via in-browser SSH and via PuTTy, same result. I had to open a second connection, kill apt processes, then dpkg --configure -a because of the error displayed below.

dpkg was interrupted, you must manually run 'sudo dpkg --configure -a' to correct the problem.

Why does this happen? Is it safe to run apt/dpkg commands in VM instances?