I've still not come up with a decent way to troubleshoot this issue but it persists. It seems to be happening quite frequently now even when I'm not accessing the substitute servers over a VPN connection. The box exhibiting this behavior consistently is a Debian 12 box with guix installed via binary install. I have another machine running an Ubuntu release and, as far as I can tell, it does not have this problem.
Still happy to get advice as to how I might be able to debug.