I used to do some freelance work years ago and I had a number of customers who operated assembly lines. I specialized in emergency database restoration, and the assembly line folks were my favorite customers. They know how much it costs them for every hour of downtime, and never balked at my rates and minimums.

The majority of the time the outages were due to failure to follow basic maintenance, and log files eating up storage space was a common culprit.

So yes, I wouldn't be surprised at all if the problem was something called out by the local IT, but were overruled for one reason or another.