Let's see if someone with knowledge of the source code has a better answer.
Someone with the knowledge (and desire) to compute the probability could say how often that occurs. It isn't that rare, ... maybe occurring once a week (wild-assed guess).
Probability is a factor, definitely.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/TargetFor reasons of stability and low latency in transactions, the network tries to produce one block every 10 minutes. Every 2016 blocks (which should take two weeks if this goal is kept perfectly), every Bitcoin client compares the actual time it took to generate these blocks with the two week goal and modifies the target by the percentage difference. This makes the proof-of-work problem more or less difficult. A single retarget never changes the target by more than a factor of 4 either way to prevent large changes in difficulty.