The described behavior, where an automation script fails to connect to an internal server exactly 50% of the time from different clients, suggests an issue with a load balancer. Load balancers distribute incoming network traffic across multiple servers to ensure reliability and performance. If a load balancer is misconfigured or if one of the backend servers is down, the connection might fail intermittently, which aligns with the described 1 out of 2 failure rate. Reference: Cisco Load Balancer Troubleshooting