Woe is me. My poor little (looks at notes) trillon dollar company can't cope! Instragram seems to be able to cope with 100000 new photos per second - that they can do. Across geographies and data centres. Ever seen a user facing error due to a newly uploaded photo?

No one expects you to just rm -rf. They just expect you to expect the same effort to remove the file that they put in to create the file. It's not like the file got propogated to 10 different data centres by accident. There was a decision that an uploda needed to be everywhere in 5 seocnds and a deletion was an advisory hint that could be ignored for a year.