Based on the reply it doesn't sound like the "investigation" has progressed However I'm also running into this and wanted to bump the thread with my details. I'll download directly as mentioned, but hopefully the underlying issue will get fixed as it's a bit annoying.
I'm on OSX 10.11.1 running Alfred v2.8 (414) currently. The app is telling me that v2.8.1 (425) is now available but like the OP, the download acts like it's starting for about a minute and then I get the red "Unable to find update zip :(" message. I've completely closed and restarted Alfred with no change.
