I got following error on an really badly "injured" Ubuntu machine:
Failed to start reboot.target: Failed to activate service 'org.freedesktop.systemd1': timed out See system logs and 'systemctl status reboot.target' for details. Failed to talk to init daemon.
Rebooting was not possible anymore, due to the beauty of 2933 zombie processes - slowing down the machine to a crawl.
However, this neat issue provided the answer to STILL get it to reboot:
# Reboot sudo systemctl --force --force reboot # Shutdown sudo systemctl --force --force poweroff
"Cool", as Gregory House would say 😉