What surprises me is that this hasn’t happened before. Maybe it was caught before it was too late in other instances, but I can definitely see this happening.
We used to have a cleaning crew that would unplug a network switch in a remote site to plug in the vacuum. It would go down every week around the same time and would come back up before we could dispatch. Took us a long while to figure out what was going on. Fortunately it was a redundant switch.