It would not have been sticky for the entire day. If it was sticky at all, it would have been only during the 90 minute period I referenced. It's most likely that there is some other issue with how you're requesting the cert. Folks can help debug at: https://community.letsencrypt.org/
Could it be that he was simply throttled while retrying? That seems plausible, and it would make it seem like a long outage.
I ran the exact same command now and it's working, so it is possible I was unlucky and was hitting all the worst possible cases.