I actually think that other than underwork you might have to hire people that you have enough "burst" performance but regularly don't have to do much.

There is a real example with global markets like the stock market. Most trades are done electronically but, if those electronic systems fail you can activate an automatic backup system which is a bunch of traders on a trading floor.

Hypothetically the recent Facebook outage could have been minimized by just having a security guard that could open and close a door. I know that DNS propagation would have still fixed it and yes the AS systems would had to have time to propagate but it still would have been a better solution.