"Prof. Mazières’s research indicated some risk that consensus could fail, though we were nor certain if the required circumstances for such a failure were realistic."

I'm surprised to see the above statement in a press release; maybe it was not worded quite right. At the scale of 100s of thousands, or a millions of transactions a day, "some risk" will manifest itself on operation timescales itself. So when one is "not certain" it's always best to assume that problems will show up and it will take less time than expected.

  "We are still investigating the triggers for this consensus failure, but believe it is caused by the innate weaknesses of the Ripple/Stellar consensus system outlined above compounded by the number of accounts in the network."

Also not great wording. Saying the system had "innate weaknesses" and we "believe" kind of implies engineers are still guessing on the trigger. Your building a financial corporation and if you lose you loose everything