The querying failure showed up and didn't go way like it has been, so I logged onto the script0 machine and it was down. Restarted it in the same screen (pid: 4403), and made sure that the ext_alert.pid had the same.
Yesterday while I was on shift I noticed that the querying failure would repeatedly pop up but then dissapear seconds later. I logged in to script0 and the script hadn't stopped, but it was just having a very hard time connecting yesterday. A "Critical connection error" would be printed frequently. Today it seemed to not be showing the same signs of connection issues, at least until I had to restart it.
The ext_alert.py script has not reported 2 different GRBs in the past two days that are on GraceDB (E194592 & E194919). Both of the external events had high latency times (3004sec and 36551sec). I am not sure if this is the reason that they were not reported. I didn't see anything in ext_alert.py or rest.py that would filter out any events with high latency, but mayb this done on the GraceDB side of things? I'll look into this more on Monday when I get a chance.