Fair enough... But then they all just did a really crappy job of concealing the patch?
Note I said decommission, not patch. And aren't most of the outages of this period routing related?
Why would you assume it to be so malicious, if true?
Maybe they were under attack. Maybe they were just removing all of the Bloomberg rice grain chips! :)
There's an infinite number of "maybe"s though. Far more than there are truths.
Your own bias about the entities shapes your conspiracy theory.
What if the NSA identified a critical backdoor and ordered all major companies to decommission and not talk about it? ( NSLs )