It used to be fairly common - for instance I've seen it happen twice from a sample of probably 400-500 machines that I've built, mainly in the late 1990s/early 2000s.
I believe it was mainly caused by early generations of CD-R and DVD-R disks which was exacerbated by dodgy labelling systems making the media more unbalanced. I've never seen or heard of it occurring with pressed media - yes there are google hits saying it happens but I've never heard of it from anyone I trust.
If this happened recently then your friend should be making a note of the batch number of the disks and possibly buying slightly more expensive media to test with? This is
very rare now - even at around 10p/disk. There are some seriously dodgy disks out there once you go below 5p right enough