Not an excuse. They had a programme for external liquidators giving some slack for trades taking the other side of liquidating positions, so Alameda should have used that. This looks worse.

In any case it's not needed: liquidators get the 3% initial margin so are usually in profit. For the cases when the market moves faster than that, they should have done what the better-run exchanges do and close the most leveraged positions from the opposite side: if lots of longs get liquidated in aggregate the shorts get their profit trimmed by the losses of the longs beyond maintenance margin, in order of leverage, which is fair enough when duly documented in the terms.