We discovered this bug when logging into labelstudio. One container of labelstudio failed to start.

Our operating environment:
k8s 1.31.11
labelstudio 1.22.0
Due to being in an internal network environment, multiple environment variables have been configured to disable application updates

Phenomenon:
Login unresponsive, keeps loading.
The screenshot of the error message is as follows:

We are running Label Studio v1.22.0 in an air-gapped Kubernetes environment (Kubernetes v1.31.11) with no outbound internet access.
To prevent any external network calls, we have explicitly set the documented environment variable:
yaml

env:

• name: LABEL_STUDIO_DISABLE_UPDATE_CHECK
  value: "true"
  However, the application still attempts to connect to https://pypi.org/pypi/label-studio/json during startup, resulting in a connection error:
  text

Starting new HTTPS connection (1): pypi.org:443
...
OSError: [Errno 101] Network is unreachable
...
requests.exceptions.ConnectionError: HTTPSConnectionPool(host='pypi.org', port=443): Max retries exceeded ...
This occurs in label_studio/core/utils/common.py within the get_latest_version() function. The failed request causes:

• Significant startup delays or hangs
• Unresponsive login page (infinite loading)
• Pod readiness failures in Kubernetes

Despite setting LABEL_STUDIO_DISABLE_UPDATE_CHECK=true, the update check is not disabled at the code level, making offline deployments unreliable in v1.22.0.

Any guidance on diagnosing the startup failure or known compatibility issues with this version in air-gapped Kubernetes environments would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!