Some time during the upgrades, Plymouth got broken. It seems that the theme got removed and so I was not getting a graphical interface and it also kept generating some warnings during updates such as:
grep: /lib/plymouth/themes/text.plymouth: No such file or directory
grep: /lib/plymouth/themes/default.plymouth: No such file or directory
Installing the following two packages fixed it for me:
sudo apt-get install plymouth-theme-ubuntu-logo
sudo apt-get install plymouth-theme-text