From a technical perspective, could they have "been better" from a technical perspective? I see their name a lot on HN so I know they are doing really cool + advanced things and this is probably some super small edge case that slipped through the cracks.
Could they have added some message / do we as the HN community feel they needed to be like "we're gonna add some extra logging/monitoring going forward so it won't happen again"?
By all means, they probably don't owe anybody in terms of stability + uptime guarantees when it comes to a free tier. Sh*t happens.