No such change here.
I checked the logs (the obvious ones) and other than some crazy activity on one of the VS (not too unusual - other than timing) everything was running as usual. As I mentioned the websites were operational + email ok in both directions. Just the locked out of :10000
I impatiently did a reboot (thanks to the provider’s “Recovery Console”
and that appeared to resolve it - still would like to know what took it down. I was wondering if it was some silent process / cron job that may have gone wrong. but why only this box? nothing out of the ordinary on here - the only system job was a backup and that seemed to have completed.