Another plausible scenario is the acquisition terms required Smyte to wind down the service over the past 6 months or build a replacement to fulfill contracts.

Another plausible scenario is the acquisition terms required Smyte to wind down the service over the past 6 months or build a replacement to fulfill contracts. Smyte didn't for whatever reason (either through negligence or negligence+hope to continue operations in a new capacity) and the deadline came to hand over the servers in the agreed condition (no externally accessible APIs available). Twitter could have stepped in and halted things, but that would have required Smyte to have acknowledged breaching the contract and forfeiting $$. This is all guess of what seems to me more likely than any Twitter exec pulling any triggers like this. Of course, it's still a screwup by Twitter to have not been tuned in and aware that fingers would point to them. But that's a very different kind of mistake than "I have an idea, let's hit the power button at 6:30. Team: you have 30 minutes to let all our customers know."