It would actually be interesting in what kind of misconfiguration lead to this - was it a simple DNS misconfiguration that wasn't accounted for?
Like many software bugs, it was an edge case that we didn't foresee, but that happened extremely rarely. We've been running Varnish for the better part of a year, millions upon millions of requests and this was the first time something like this has ever happened.
Of course, none of that wipes the egg off of our face. ;)
=P