We all understand the perverse incentives joke, I think what's confusing people here is whether there's some other hidden joke they're missing that suggests not to take OP at his word that yes, he did make off with someone else's gift, which is generally considered a dick move.

What the hell are all of you smoking, some moderately expensive alcohol is nowhere near enough reward to take down a service.

If it was a sure thing that the ops engineers were doing that, then sure, it'd be kinda funny. Otherwise it just seems like a dick move.

The alcohol was an incentive to bring the service back up quickly, but not an incentive to prevent it going down in the first place. Twitter was going down often enough on its own that nobody needed to be motivated to help it crash (except that bringing it back up sooner gives it another opportunity to crash again sooner).

Operant conditioning is a thing and it works.

While I and you would not do this I’m afraid that it would somehow find a way to work in this case too.

Ops engineers don't get paid enough to fix dev fuck ups enough as it is. No amount of beer is going to fix that.