How many millions in orders do they normally process per minute?

Since there were no procedures in place, would you like to be the guy who pulled the plug on the (let's guess) $100 million/minute processing system? Do you think you could get another job after that? What would the costs be for violating contracts? You could single handedly sink the company (which, in the end, this issue basically did).

I don't blame the guy for not killing all operations. He never should have been put in that situation. Proper QA, regression testing, monitoring, running a shadow copy and verifying it's output, there are tons of things that could have prevented/mitigated this.