There is no way the agent could know, but that's quite a creative BS story, I have to say.
Points for that, right?
The actual issue is that there's a bug in a nightly process that's accidentally overwriting the value. I work with a lot of customized data warehousing applications (one for DVC, as a matter of fact, although not this particular one) and these things happen. My hunch is that they have the fix ready, but it'll take a little while to QA it and get it rolled out. Just hang tight - it will eventually be corrected and we'll all just move on with life as usual.