Most anyone who has built a high-demand service has encountered issues exactly like this. Unusual activity places stress on a small piece of poorly optimized c

Most anyone who has built a high-demand service has encountered issues exactly like this. Unusual activity places stress on a small piece of poorly optimized code that was never tested for it, and never considered because it’s never been an issue before. A fleet of hardware goes idle while the single lock spins. Whatever personal issues you may have with the admins, it's extremely plausible that this issue was sufficient to cause an outage. And yes these things happen at big tech companies and mature software products even when they have teams and testing frameworks specifically looking for them. A smaller project like this, I cut them a break.