In the interview, am I allowed to fix the server (which apparently "breaks down handling concurrent requests") instead of working on this silly programming exer

In the interview, am I allowed to fix the server (which apparently "breaks down handling concurrent requests") instead of working on this silly programming exercise? What about proxy solutions? IE, proxies that take concurrent requests and serialize them? The question mainly seems to be working around framework limitations and broken externalities, and the interviewing is providing a signal ("you do not want to work here")