I worked at place in the late 90s where that was true, at least for anything Internet related. We were doing (oh so primitive by today's standards...) Web development and it happened so many times. I'd call downstairs and they'd swear DNS was fine, and then 20 minutes to half an hour later, it would all be mysteriously working again. But only if we called down heh heh.

On an unrelated note, one of the folks down there explained the DNS setup once and it was like something out of a Stephen King novel. They'd even been told by a recognized industry expert (whose name I sadly can't remember any more) that what they needed to do was impossible, but they still did it. Somehow.

They really were great folks, they just had that one quirk but after a while I could just chuckle about it.

Years ago, my boss thought he was being clever and set our server’s DNS to the root nameservers. We kept getting sporadic timeouts on requests. That took a while to track down… I think I got a pizza out of the deal.