Why is our country codes data lookup being so finicky?

Hey everyone, we run a handy little web tool called 'Country Codes Directory' – you know, the one that helps folks navigate the wild world of international phone, calling, dialing, and ISO codes. Lately, though, its core data lookup functionality has decided to develop a bit of a personality, becoming incredibly finicky and inconsistent.

It's like it's throwing a tantrum; sometimes queries for specific country codes return only partial results, other times it's painfully slow, and then, just to keep us on our toes, it'll outright error out for perfectly valid requests. It's truly baffling, especially since the underlying data source is supposed to be as stable as a rock. I'm tearing my hair out trying to figure out what's causing this intermittent madness. What are some common causes or debugging strategies you all employ for web tools that perform frequent data lookups when your data source claims to be solid?