alt Hacker NewsI find this hard to believe in this context. They should be utilizing load shedding or admission control and killing/rejecting jobs rather than hard failures if it is a scaling issue. It's much more likely an actual software defect than just more load. If this was the case (which they would likely prefer) free/public tiers would be removed first to preserve paying customers services.
Why not both? Higher base load combined with insufficient internal controls for ratelimiting/load-shedding (as in, they don’t know who to shed) would be explanatory.