We don't know much about the specific client configuration change that triggered this condition yet. It doesn't necessarily have to be a big company wide infrastructure change.

To me it sounds plausible that an SRE team in an alternate location made a change scoped to their permission level, following company-directed playbooks, which eventually triggered the faulty condition at Fastly.

Many big tech companies (and individual products within the company) rotate oncall/release/SRE responsibilities between NA and EU. HQ doesn't need to be awake in these cases.