Essentially, no. The difficulty is recalculated every 2016 blocks (~14 days). This can be a problem with small altcoins. If they are suddenly overhype, part of a pump&dump scheme or by another reason they have a big hashrate that suddenly decrease and they have now a very low hashrate and now the expected time to the next block is far away (and the next difficulty correction is even further). I'm sure there are a few horror stories like this, but I can't find one now. In this case, the coin is effectively dead, but probably it was dead before.
A similar but smaller effect is when the pools switch from coin to coin. They mine when the difficulty is low (or the price is high) and then switch away when the difficulty is high (or the price is low). One solution is to have auxiliary proof of work, were you pigiback from another coin that has a bigger and more predictable hashrate.
To solve a drastic change in hashrate, I think that the only solution is an out of protocol hard fork. Everyone agree to use the new official client that has a ad hoc change in the difficulty since the current bloc. (This is effectively a new coin, but if everyone pretends that it's the old coin, nobody will notice the difference.) It's a drastic solution and I'm not sure if it was used in the wild. Probably this is unacceptable for the Bitcoin community, but perhaps this can be possible with more centralized communities were the developers and creator have a strong participation, like dogecoin.
A similar but smaller effect is when the pools switch from coin to coin. They mine when the difficulty is low (or the price is high) and then switch away when the difficulty is high (or the price is low). One solution is to have auxiliary proof of work, were you pigiback from another coin that has a bigger and more predictable hashrate.
To solve a drastic change in hashrate, I think that the only solution is an out of protocol hard fork. Everyone agree to use the new official client that has a ad hoc change in the difficulty since the current bloc. (This is effectively a new coin, but if everyone pretends that it's the old coin, nobody will notice the difference.) It's a drastic solution and I'm not sure if it was used in the wild. Probably this is unacceptable for the Bitcoin community, but perhaps this can be possible with more centralized communities were the developers and creator have a strong participation, like dogecoin.