Such theories can easily be tested with a simple thought experiment: suppose there were a similar bug at the other end of the pipeline, in the subscribe feature. How long would it take for the bug to be fixed?

The excuse of "our sales people have no way to contact the web developer who's on vacation, and we don't have a bug tracking system in place" might work for a dentist's office, but not a company that prides itself in developing online software and tools for maintaining web sites, and brands its products with the buzz-word "Cloud".

When one works for companies of such size, discovers there is a huge difference between how things should be and how they actually are.

I agree, the sales / support staff is probably a different department. They probably don't even know who to contact. I'd imagine it would work something like this. I need to contact my manager, who then has to contact their boss. The boss will have to find the head of the support department in charge of this. Crap, it went to the wrong department. You have to email this person instead. Then it has to trickle down again. It's basically a game of telephone.

WTF. Every product should have an internal bug tracker, and support should especially be able to file bugs against products. Those bugs have just cost the company money by using support resources. I don't understand how this can be hard to understand.