I had a similar problem and after many many hours of pulling my hair I finally found the culprit.

Turns out the query was using the global scope I had set on the model. Even though the (eloquent) query is updating/creating it still uses the global scopes you have set up.

So, adding withoutGlobalScope(YourGlobalScope::class) before the updateOrCreate() method fixed my issue. Hope this helps someone and saves you few hours of debugging!