Thanks for your no idea - idea 
I believe the box regularly uses ntp to sync with the world clock, no?
I checked Munin via the admin panel and found ntp stopped during my outage (probably due to DNS failing):
… and also noticed that it appears that all prior ntp states have vanished prior to my issue:
My box was not resolving from itself. Command line dig and ping would time out unable to resolve domain.name. 127.0.0.1:53 wasn’t working plus my FQDN disappeared from the world as well. All DNS kaput!
I also noticed while starting and restarting services that this reported “bug” still exists:
NSD daemon fails to log into /var/log/ directory #2313 but I don’t know that that would have caused my issue.
I’m still digging - I don’t want this to happen again.
I’m very much considering moving from Gandi as most of the problems MIAB related that I’m finding in my searches were using Gandi, plus Gandi upsells their domains nearly 4 times cost. $40 a year?! I’ve talked to Coudflare - and they apparently can do the same thing for me that Gandi is providing - I just have to have their support do it for me.
Thank you for your response - and if any moderator could move this to the “Maintenance” forum, I now see that this is where this thread should go … Thanks again!