Once you look up the address for Army.ca you system will cache it for a period of time. Our setup replies with both addresses in a random order, and most programs pick the first in the list. (So we have poor man's load balancing as a result.)
If you looked up the "good" address first you're in luck. If you got the one that was down, you would generally try to connect to it, time out, and then try the one that was up. (Hence the delay) Some programs will not fail over though (or not do it very well) so it would seem like the server was down all together.