Debit Card Declined For No Reason

So my wife was running errands today and needed to get some gas after grocery shopping. She first went to a station that runs everything as credit with zip code for verification and her card was declined. This was an un-staffed gas station so she went down the road to the next station that has a debit option and was declined again with pin. This station was staffed so she went inside to pre-pay and even inside she was declined, so the issue wasn't the classic gas station "hold" which wouldn't have made sense anyway as we have plenty in that checking account. She happened to have cash on her(which is fairly abnormal for us but might not be in the future after this) so she just pre-paid with cash and got fuel. This is where it got kinda weird.

She called the number on the card to find out what the issue is and they told her she had reached her daily limit. So she asked what the daily limit is and they replied it is $5000. She then asked how much she had spent today and the answer was $143.75, nowhere close to the limit. The rep has no answers for why she was flagged for spending limit other than it must be some kind of bug. She was then told it is impossible to clear this and the card will not be usable until 1am the next business day(which will be Monday) and there was no further action or escalation available to fix it.

My question is, is this really how it works? So if I'm on a road trip in a town without a branch and don't have cash on me there is a chance my card will bug out and decide I have hit my spending limit and I could be stuck somewhere with 0 money for days for 0 reason? This wasn't a fraud protection issue, those are easily cleared immediately. The customer service rep specifically said it was the daily limit. Was this rep just severely mis-informed?