But, yeah, I hear you... Great movie as well. One of few that brings my favorite mad scientist into eye of mainstream audience as well. I doubt I must name him. :)
EDIT to add: I'm guessing you think the geeks were too sadistic to pass up the opportunity, eh?
No, it just seems weird, that's all. I don't see how either interpretation would benefit HP.
I mean, I've heard about things so wrong and ease it's like shooting fish in a bucket but... exploding fish in a datacenter? That's on another level.
Apparently 5 server racks in the middle of an open field is a "datacenter".
The common trend is that the systems constantly sync critical data, can detect downtime, and automatically (or manually) fail-over when it occurs. Been OS's and ISV's offering that capability with many proven in field going back decades. Certain high-tech companies just don't apply those for whatever reasons. Maybe their stacks just still don't have that feature.
That all assumes there's a total and catastrophic failure at main datacenter. If not, there's local backup batteries to sustain a smoother, fail-over plus shutdown. Plus, there's tricks like isolating the monitoring systems from main systems and power supply using things data diodes over octocouplers or infrared. At least one thing will still be working and feeding you reliable information over a wireless connection after the full failure.
NonStop and VMS setups from late 80's did better than Github. My own setups involving a minimum of servers plus apps with loose coupling could fail-over in such a situation. So, this just has to be bad architecture caused by who knows what. Examples below of OpenVMS in catastrophic situations having either no downtime or short downtime due to good architecture plus disaster planning.
Case study of active-active at World Trade Center http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/brochures/commerzbank/comm...
Marketing piece where HP straight-up detonates a datacenter. Guess who was number 1 in recovery. :) https://youtu.be/bUwthF9x210?t=34s