This supports the theory that between 50%-80% of outages are caused by human error, regardless of the resilience of the underlying infrastructure.
Not quite - in this case, a single human error then triggered a series of latent and undiscovered bugs in the system itself. It's a confluence of small events that makes for a large-scale problem like this.
I hate to quote Rumsfeld, but there are known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. Of course you want to eliminate the latter-- but there's (necessarily) no way you can ever know that you've done so.
If not then with little hard work and smart work here and there any body can beat these 'best' during non crisis times. And during the crisis time all are same any way.
Probably that's why there are a lot of successful companies even with average talented people.