You're correct, it was a bad design. The vendor that built this system had a number of issues in this realm that demonstrated a lack of experience in building f

You're correct, it was a bad design. The vendor that built this system had a number of issues in this realm that demonstrated a lack of experience in building for the reliability targets of telecom. This was just one of the easier stories to tell. STONITH is a good design option, but I think this implementation would've still struggled. The way they were tracking processes was fragile, so the shoot the process lost track of which pid it should signal. And this was a sort of clustered system, so if you shoot the node you take out other services (think of murdering a kubernetes node to terminate one process, you're going to inflict some spillover.)