It's great to hear everything is now working for you as it should.
I'd recommend to run a
pihole checkout ftl master
now to get back on track, otherwise, you will be fixed to this special version and won't receive any updates in the future. They are only published on the master branch.
Actually, it's not odd at all. The entire system has problems, you may not have noticed them as many things can be automatically retried (possibly but not necessarily with some extra timeouts) but you just found a case where it actually matters. It only remains for me to say that this is not an issue that affects Pi-hole alone. It just happend to be the most complex network application on your Raspberry.