[icedpulleys]

My tl;dr reads differently: "we lacked appropriate congestion control in our EBS recovery algorithms."

The trigger was a bad and unexpected network configuration change, but the error was that the attempted recovery by the stuck volumes was that it was uncontrolled.

I don't think that anyone is knocking the intelligence of the AWS engineers, or saying that anyone else could do it better. Just like NASA engineers and scientists are incredibly intelligent and good at what they do, systems can become complicated enough that unexpected errors creep into the system, and not any particular component.