Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could also just be a bunch of IoT devices running on synchronized time source that have what amounts to a defrost cronjob. And a latent bug that due to everything being synced and on the same schedule failed in the same manner (eg crashed the controller immediately after turning the heating element on and either didn’t boot back up or booted and some shitty programming forgot to check the heating element status). Sav…
IE, a quickly applied patch that failed.
Doesn’t require and patching at all. These things lurk for years or decades before finally meeting the conditions needed to be exposed. Many times one-off failures that underwrote the issue are written off as hardware failure or whatnot and not actually diagnosed until something like this happens.