How to Resolve Maven's ''Failure to Transfer'' Error

Here is a quick solution for those encountering the “Failure to Transfer” error in Maven.
The error message will most likely look something like this

Failure to transfer <DEPENDENCY> from <REPOSITORY>
was cached in the local repository, resolution will not be reattempted until 
the update interval of central has elapsed or updates are forced.

This is a documented issue in Maven’s jira page.

When an artifact is unable to be downloaded, Maven 3 caches this result for future reference in the “~/.m2/repo/…/<artifact>.lastUpdated” file. For “not found” situations, it seems that the HTTP code could be used to more granularly re-attempt retrieval rather than just cache the failure.

For example, for any 404, I agree, the result should cache the failure and require a -U to attempt to retrieve it again. However, for 400, 500, 501, 502, 503, 301, 302 (what’s the Maven behavior for 3xx today?) I think the resolution engine should try to re-retrieve the artifact each time. With those error codes, it seems more likely a config issue or brief network hiccup, not one of the file being absent from that repo. However, that brief network hiccup has longstanding cache implications in that the file is never attempted to be retrieved again.

The easiest way to resolve this is to delete the dependencies or artifacts which maven has appended with the .lastUpdated prefix.  Only after that can you successfully Update Dependencies of your maven project.
But deleting all these artifacts from your maven repository one by one every time this occurs is not an ideal solution.
The most simple solution is suggested by Jonas Anderson in Stackoverflow.

For Unix Users

1. find ~/.m2  -name "*.lastUpdated" -exec grep -q "Could not transfer" {} \; -print -exec rm {} \;

2. Right click your project and choose Update Dependencies

For Windows

1. CD (change directory) to
   <user-directory>\.m2\repository
2. execute this command
   for /r %i in (*.lastUpdated) do del %i
3. Right click your project and choose Update Dependencies