Sounds like there was a serious bug somewhere in the software that didn't surface until the system was stressed in a way the designers never thought to test it with. slightly reminiscent of the Y2K problem - something that seemed reasonable at the time: only referring to years by the last two digits because, after all, the year 2000 was, like, years away, suddenly became a big problem because the question of how dates should be represented was never revisited and new systems simply picked up that original assumption without ever questioning it.