Looking for internet/network insight

I had an unusual experience yesterday and I'm hoping one of you can help me gain insight.

My wife said she was having internet issues so I immediately power cycled "everything". Modem, router, switches, etc. on a switched surge protector.

When everything came back up, the Arris Modem connection looked good as did the event log. However, I couldn't connect to Cox via internet to see if there was an outage. My wife could not connect to her work. However, I could connect to Gmail, send a Gmail to Outlook, open Outlook via web, and could successfully perform Google searches.

So, I thought, perhaps there is a DNS issue going on. I tried to ping 8.8.8.8 and it timed out. I tried to tracert to 8.8.8.8 and never got a response back from my Google router. So, I concluded that perhaps my router had failed, or perhaps Google was having an issue (config is managed in the cloud) so needed a work around. I then grabbed my wife's laptop and connected it to the back of the modem and rebooted the modem. I figured if I could establish a connection that way I could jury rig a connection to her office while I addressed the router. Everything came up, I could ping 8.8.8.8, I could tracert. So, I figured I'd take a minute and swap back to the router just to confirm. Rebooted, and everything went back to working just fine.  I told my wife she could go back to work, and reached out to Google to see if they could provide an explanation. They did a little research and said they had no sign of issues and my network looked good from there end (I had to enable access).

So, any thoughts? The behavior suggests something like bad cached DNS, but I would have expected a power cycle to correct that. I'm trying to understand what might have occurred so I can be more proactive going forward. Then again, I've never seen this before.