This exact problem happened with an optic in my lab in graduate school. For two years the senior grad student and postdoc blamed each other over the entire apparatus becoming misaligned every couple of days. (It was a really toxic environment.) Eventually, they both left, I was the only one there, and it still became misaligned. In one day I tracked it down to a prism from Thorlabs whose glue had gone bad positioned at the very beginning of the laser line- it was sliding in its mount.
I wish I had pushed more strongly about it. We spent probably a full person-day of work every week on that.
Reminds me of that giant pager outage ~ 20 years back. I remember one of the stories mentioned a woman who was going to leave her husband because he wasn't answering her page.
Well that's just abusive, really (to threaten to leave someone for not being in minute by minute contact with them/clear signs of an abuser power tripping).
Later in my career, I worked for a company whose principal technical strength was that they knew how to glue optics together in such a way that they NEVER moved, either thermally, or from shock. Detachment? The optic would break in an area besides the glue joint first. And the solution had little to do with the nature of which glue, which however was also optimized. These assemblies were flown in space, landed on the moon, and were in all U.S attack helicopters.
I wish I had pushed more strongly about it. We spent probably a full person-day of work every week on that.