hi @cshipley_6136,
We chatted a bit about this as a team today.
We believe that the application failed during initialization (i.e. the first web request after starting the service); when this happens, the error message will be returned until you restart the application (container/service).
This is by design; there's no way to guess where or why the initialization failed, and if we "crash" the application (and trigger a restart), it can end up in a endless loop and make diagnosing really difficult.
In this case, the error is network related (server name not found). That error can be transient when you have network problems, or permanent if it's a typo in the connection string.
Since restarting the application (container) fixed it, then it was a transient network issue that happened during initialization.
Hope this helps,
Steve