He’s using it as a subdomain.
Lots of folks were using "dev" as a sub-domain which was fine until ICANN decide to give Google a TLD:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.dev
So if you generally had "search example.com" in you resolv.conf, and were in the habit of having "web01.dev" in places, behaviour may have changed if you were suddenly on a machine that had the "search" line missing (or something else).
That won't prevent me from getting a ticket saying "the network is down".