My guess is it either got some boilerplate response from L2 instead of actually going to a network engineer or it did go to a network engineer but they're connecting from a different network with different traffic management and don't see the issue.
At my old uni, L1 were paid students, L2 were paid staff, and L3 were the actual netops/sysadmins so sometimes L2 would try to close something out that needed escalated.
In addition, they had resnet (residential network) and pronet (professional network) where the former was for student housing and the latter everything else. Resnet had more restrictions and traffic shaping such that pronet traffic was prioritized. In addition, resnet wireless had a different NAT setup whereas resnet wired used public IPs with inbound traffic blocked. This lead to all kinds of caveats like online gaming using uPnP only working on wireless despite wired having public IPs.
Regardless of which network they connect from, I would expect that a network engineer knows that if a TCP handshake with the web server (i.e. after DNS lookup) fails at the 3rd step, then it's not DNS. The fact that the TCP handshake begun is evidence that DNS works.
At my old uni, L1 were paid students, L2 were paid staff, and L3 were the actual netops/sysadmins so sometimes L2 would try to close something out that needed escalated.
In addition, they had resnet (residential network) and pronet (professional network) where the former was for student housing and the latter everything else. Resnet had more restrictions and traffic shaping such that pronet traffic was prioritized. In addition, resnet wireless had a different NAT setup whereas resnet wired used public IPs with inbound traffic blocked. This lead to all kinds of caveats like online gaming using uPnP only working on wireless despite wired having public IPs.