"They did what anyone would do after reading one too many astroturf articles on Hacker News. Sure, their system failed, but in a sense, the overall system faile

"They did what anyone would do after reading one too many astroturf articles on Hacker News. Sure, their system failed, but in a sense, the overall system failed them." The technology didn't fail them. On the contrary, the technology did exactly what it was supposed to do. The devs could have (should have) considered these race condition scenarios.