Nah, the problem is as old as sailing.

Sometimes the cargo liquefies for a short period when shocked, then stops flowing. This would cause the ship to list as the cargo takes a new shape.

Hard to debug is when the problem causes ships to be lost with all hands. Think in terms of early planes flying into cloud cover and reliably spiraling to crash.

something like this was a plot point in one of the Neal Stephenson wrist-breakers [0]. <elided plot spoilers>

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Baroque_Cycle