Geologist timer resets?

I sent out my Geologist to find coal mines at 3am PST. It is 8:30am now and they have well over 2 hours left on their timers. I've seen this happen before and thought I missed something or was mistaken. But this time around I know that I saw them with 30min or so left around 7am PST.

I do know that there are server resets occassionally, but this is annoying when a Geologist that should find a mine in 4 hours takes about 7-8hours to do that task. Why is this happening? It doesn't appear to be affecting the scout timers.

Same issue here 20120507 1pm edt

it happens, usually for me around once a week. It sucks but for a free game a bug a week isn't bad. Most of the things governed by the timers go wonky with the same frequency, like generals taking 25 minutes (should be 15) or 45 (should be 30) occasionally. The scouts do not seem to get lost, but some players were tracking exact times they send and the return and found they were an hour late some times. I personally have had a 12 hour coal search, and even sent other geos in the interim but they couldn't find the node either. It happens.