This means twitter had omni backend tooling that have manual/programmatic admin level access to production database.
This is a very bad idea, access to production tables should be through a controlled medium and always challenged.
So I can see why they wouldn't have one of those pre-built for setting the entire site to a read-only mode. It's not at all obvious whether the risks are larger with or without that capability built in. But a spam filter with configs you can push quickly seems like table stakes, and should be a system that gets excercised weekly if not daily.
On the other hand, a product like Twitter having some content moderation filter seems very likely.
One of the largest problems of our industry.
What about the circuit breakers at their data centers? Serious question..
This is in many ways worse than your typical large-scale malware or ransomware crisis (like the one that hit Maersk for example).
Malware or ransomware attacks are typically limited to internal company impact with potential stolen data (which you usually discover after it’s been stolen already).
This current situation however has ongoing external impact for as long as the platform is kept online and could even have geopolitical repercussions if a certain high-profile “real” account ends up affected.
The fact that they left the platform online for so long with an ongoing, uncontained attack is absolutely irresponsible.
(Yes, yes, staged rollouts. But anti-abuse systems don't work by those rules, at least in emergencies.)