I suspect the author was in the same timezone as the customer. Not all customers will have follow the sun coverage. The customer had also mitigated the problem

I suspect the author was in the same timezone as the customer. Not all customers will have follow the sun coverage. The customer had also mitigated the problem for the time being. It does show that embracing good change management techniques is important. The VM in question clearly had runtime configs updated manually or other VMs would have exhibited the same problem. Ideally orgs should be able to identify when the change was introduced and the rationale / tests that were used.