Assuming you’re getting regular dried pasta, there is no cooking happening to it at the factory, it’s all happening in your pot. It’s extruded or rolled out and cut and then just dried still raw. There may be some products out there that are precooked in some way, but that’s not your standard dry pasta noodle.

There’s two aspects to cooking dried pasta that usually happens roughly simultaneously when you boil it- rehydrating the noodles and cooking them. Rehydrating is mostly a matter of time- making sure they spend enough time in enough liquid for the pasta to soak it up, although higher temperatures do speed that up a bit. And cooking is mostly a matter of temperature- making sure it gets up to a temperature where the necessary chemical changes happen. There’s some recipes where that gets mixed up a bit, I’ve seen a couple that call for soaking the pasta before cooking, or there’s things like spaghetti all’assassina where it’s cooked before rehydrating.

So what’s going on here?

I suppose it’s possible that there was some kind of manufacturing issue, like the pasta wasn’t mixed or dried right so it’s not cooking or rehydrating properly. There’s really not much to most pasta dough, some nicer brands literally just list flour of some kind as an ingredient and nothing else, most grocery store brands probably have some of the other usual food additives you’d find in enriched flour, but really there’s not too much to mess up there, and if they messed up the mixing bad enough, odds are in probably wouldn’t have extruded or rolled out right either.

And I have a hard time imagining them screwing up the drying process bad enough in a way that could result in this that wouldn’t have just resulted in the pasta cracking apart before you got it.

So I think it’s more likely that something went screwy with the cooking.

I know you said you didn’t, but honestly the safe money is probably on that you just didn’t cook it long enough. Maybe it’s a different brand than you usually get, or you mistakenly used the cooking instructions from a different shape of pasta, or there was a misprint on the box.

Maybe you’re at a higher elevation where water boils at a lower temperature so the cooking and rehydration didn’t go quite right.

Maybe you over or under salted the cooking water, or added something else which affected it

Or maybe there’s some other water quality issue where your water that didn’t allow it to rehydrate as well as it should have.

Maybe it’s something else I’m not thinking of, but I can say with confidence that it wasn’t an issue with the cooking process at the factory because pasta does not get cooked and the factory.