Not as rare as you would think...
I used to work at Dell's US based call center for US Business owned PCs. It was neither rare nor unusual for the whole DellServ system to be down. Happened about once a month, up to a full day. We quite often had to keep taking calls, writing them down on paper and punching them into dellserv when it came back up. We were expected to do this while recieving non-stop calls at the same time. Needless to say, quite a few support calls would get lost in the confusion. As for wait times, I was in the XPS queue at one point. Late at night (10pm - 1am-ish) we would have 5 or 6 people supporting every business owned XPS in the united states. The queue regularly got to 1 hour, 30 people deep. Occasionally they got to 1.5 hours. There really was nothing we could do except dump them out to overseas XPS support when we finally closed the seriously understaffed queue. There are more horror stories (commonly, the overseas support was so poorly trained to parrot what they read, that they would see certain models of inspiron and send them to the XPS queue, because some XPS were the exact same, just rebranded.)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
