diff --git a/param_decomp_lab/infra/hf_http.py b/param_decomp_lab/infra/hf_http.py
index 5d461e829..ba70620d5 100644
--- a/param_decomp_lab/infra/hf_http.py
+++ b/param_decomp_lab/infra/hf_http.py
@@ -4,7 +4,7 @@
 adapter for metadata calls like `HfApi.repo_info` — the call `datasets` makes to resolve
 a streaming dataset's layout at startup. A single `ReadTimeout` there raises, and in a
 DDP job that one rank's failure tears down every rank before training begins. This mounts
-a retrying adapter on the session factory so connect/read timeouts and 5xx/429 are
+a retrying adapter on the session factory so connect/read timeouts and 408/429/5xx are
 retried with jittered backoff across *all* Hub HTTP calls (dataset, tokenizer, model).
 """
 
@@ -36,7 +36,7 @@ def configure_hf_http_retries(*, total_retries: int = 5, backoff_factor: float =
         status=total_retries,
         backoff_factor=backoff_factor,
         backoff_jitter=1.0,
-        status_forcelist=(429, 500, 502, 503, 504),
+        status_forcelist=(408, 429, 500, 502, 503, 504),
         allowed_methods=frozenset({"GET", "HEAD", "OPTIONS"}),
         respect_retry_after_header=True,
         raise_on_status=False,