The grok-bot machine is dead now. Starting Oct 10, if no bot is running, it auto-sleeps after 5 minutes, so anything long-running on it gets suspended with it. No wonder my Hermes was crawling yesterday, every step of a long task took 10+ minutes (my cron watchdog for the bot fires every 10 minutes, so the timing lined up). I opened grok-bot to check what was slow and Hermes immediately went back to normal.
The grok-bot machine is dead now.