That's quite strange. You could move the .spacemacs.d and restart, just to check there isn't a bug in there (apologies if there is)
If Emacs is less than version 26.3 then it could be the authentication issue with melpa.
If it's MacOSX it could be running the old Emacs 22 that is included by default
Its manjaro linux, and emacs version is 27.2, i just tried a fresh install of soom emacs and it worked (I guess its cloning repos instead if installing packages from melpa but not sure)
Could be melpa having issues, it's rare but happens.
I was using Emacs 27 without any issues, although am using Emacs 28 snapshots on Ubuntu at the moment