This is at least the 4th time I've noticed symptoms like this and manually gone to restart the server.
I was getting persistent failure to update a git repository, either with this: fatal: read error: Connection reset by peer or with this diagnostic: fatal: Could not read from remote repository. Please make sure you have the correct access rights and the repository exists. So I ran "service xinetd restart", but had to do it twice: The first time, it appeared not to work: Stopping internet superserver: xinetd. Starting internet superserver: xinetd failed! The second time worked. No time to investigate, but I can once again fetch from git repositories, so we're probably good for a few more weeks.