At 03:30 the store's collector held the registry still while the node-engine's reconcile on that machine was fetching bundle blobs from it: every archive failed 'connection refused' and the machine was held until the next pass. Other machines can meet the same window. A scheduled step now opens its window only once no apply is in flight here (the apply lock is taken just to write the record, so a push still never queues behind the window). An apply whose fetch the store does not answer waits for a window open on its own machine to close, and elsewhere retries with backoff within one bounded budget per apply, well past the window's length; an answer such as 404 still fails at once.