Far from being at risk of being fired their whole PR department is probably swelled by ranks of excruciatingly expensive corporate emergency consultants and experts paid precisely to output this kind of menial drivel.
How were they supposed to avoid an exploit that no one would discover for years? And exactly how is "appeal to common practice" a fallacious or unsound argument?
Exactly how much performance -- meaning, how much market share -- is Intel supposed to sacrifice to avoid the possibility of introducing unforeseen bugs?
Also, appealing to common practice doesn't make logical sense.
It is hazardous to apply logical arguments blindly in illogical contexts, such as competitive markets.
Again: mitigating all possible bugs isn't free. Exactly how much effort and expense is worthwhile, and how do you know beforehand?
One way to interpret the statement is that the chip design which they utilized is widely available and understood by everyone in the chip community to be good chip design, thus we aren't at fault, because everyone is doing it.
To reiterate those types of arguments are a very serious logical fallacy and unsound argument called appealing to common practice.
They should fire their PR team.