This has nothing to do with automation of deployments. Any part of an automated deployment can fail. At scale a single failure cannot be allowed to halt the dep

This has nothing to do with automation of deployments. Any part of an automated deployment can fail. At scale a single failure cannot be allowed to halt the deployment, either. This is an architectural mistake. Distributed systems must always be able to operate in an environment with a variety of versions, without ill effects. They repurposed a flag and then failed to test the mixed environment. Hindsight is 20/20, of course.