Does a load of 41.20 (!?) suggest a hardware failure?

I have Ubuntu 24.04 on a Raspberry Pi 4 and after months of working fine, today it has jumped to a load 41 for no apparent reason. Can't connect to remote MySQL instance from the server. And gitlab keeps telling me my login is invalid. Not sure where to start researching what's causing the problem The only thing running all this time was gitlab 16.9.2 community edition, and I was doing some react Front and and node.js API development. I'd appreciate some tips on deciphering this crazy load?