I have tested this (on a windows machine) and it works as advised.

Just tested on my mac and I'm getting

george@ ~/Sites/jissues (master) $ vagrant up
Bringing machine 'default' up with 'virtualbox' provider...
==> default: Box 'jissues-debian-jessie64-v2' could not be found. Attempting to find and install...
    default: Box Provider: virtualbox
    default: Box Version: >= 0
==> default: Box file was not detected as metadata. Adding it directly...
==> default: Adding box 'jissues-debian-jessie64-v2' (v0) for provider: virtualbox
    default: Downloading: https://atlas.hashicorp.com/debian/boxes/contrib-jessie64/versions/8.8.0/providers/virtualbox.box
An error occurred while downloading the remote file. The error
message, if any, is reproduced below. Please fix this error and try
again.

The requested URL returned error: 404 Not Found

I changed it to require a box in the usual way (i.e. not give a custom box name but give a box name of debian/contrib-jessie64 and it downloaded the box. However then I get when loading the site

PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library '/usr/lib/php/20160303/mysqli.so' - /usr/lib/php/20160303/mysqli.so: undefined symbol: mysqlnd_global_stats

@wilsonge seems that they changed the source. Try this one:
https://app.vagrantup.com/debian/boxes/jessie64/versions/8.10.0/providers/virtualbox.box

The link works I still get the mysql error

Hmm, did not face it. Have you tried to destroy vagrant instance and run it again?

Multiple times :)

Also tried version 8.8 of the box (as that's what you have been trying) as well as the 8.10 build - both have the same issue

I don't get it :) I also have tried several versions (destroying the previous ones) and did not hit it :( What I hit is that Debian was not able to install some packages because of not found problem. This was solved by:

vagrant ssh
sudo su
apt-get update --fix-missing

Then run vagrant provision.