Azure download VHD fails

I just lost access to an Ubuntu VM on azure, and I am attempting to download the VHD to another VM to recover data from the disk.

I'm using the azure command line tool to accomplish this. I've imported the publishsettings file and am able to view the VMs/storage accounts. However when I attempt to download the vhd the transfer always fails. The error I'm getting is

error:   getaddrinfo ENOTFOUND
info:    Error information has been recorded to azure.err
error:   storage blob download command failed

To me this sounds like a connectivity issue, but I can't understand why this would happen when transferring to a VM on azure. I ran the command using debug mode to see if this would provide more information, and it seems that it retries the connection about 30 times when it first fails. The file transfer seems to fail at different points, sometimes reaching as much as 3GB (out of 30), other times failing after a few hundred MB.

Can anyone suggest why this might be happening?