Why does BitBake error if it can't find www.example.com?

Modifying poky.conf didn't work for me (and from what I read, modifying anything under Poky is a no-no for a long term solution).

Modifying /conf/local.conf was the only solution that worked for me. Simply add one of the two options:

#check connectivity using google
CONNECTIVITY_CHECK_URIS = "https://www.google.com/"

#skip connectivity checks
CONNECTIVITY_CHECK_URIS = ""

This solution was originally found here.

For me, this appears to be a problem with my ISP (CenturyLink) not correctly resolving www.example.com. If I try to navigate to https://www.example.com in the browser address bar I just get taken to the ISP's "this is not a valid address" page.

Technically speaking, this isn't supposed to happen, but for whatever reason it does. I was able to work around this temporarily by modifying the CONNECTIVITY_CHECK_URIS in poky/meta-poky/conf/distro/poky.conf to something that actually resolves:

# The CONNECTIVITY_CHECK_URI's are used to test whether we can succesfully
# fetch from the network (and warn you if not). To disable the test set
# the variable to be empty.
# Git example url: git://git.yoctoproject.org/yocto-firewall-test;protocol=git;rev=master    
CONNECTIVITY_CHECK_URIS ?= "https://www.google.com/"

See this commit for more insight and discussion on the addition of the www.example.com check. Not sure what the best long-term fix is, but the change above allowed me to build successfully.