As one of the other commenters noted, a ~20 character salt command will do this. I doubt Joyent built a Big Red Button to take down a datacenter, I expect this will be the case of somebody missing an asterisk or omitting a crucial flag while trying to do their normal work.

You build a way to automatically perform some mundane standard procedure, like propagating a new firewall rule to all your systems at once. Then you accidentally propagate a rule that blocks all inbound ports. Huh, when I tested locally I didn't notice that.

Or you build a way to automatically delete timestamped log files more than a month old. And when it runs in production, it also deletes critical libraries which have the build timestamp in their filename. Ah, the test server was running a nightly build instead of a release so the files were named differently.

Or you build a way to automatically deploy the post-heartbleed replacement certificates to all your TLS servers, and only after you do that you find you didn't deploy the replacement corporate CA certificate to all the clients. Hmm, the test environment has a different CA arrangement, so testers don't get the private keys of prod certificates.

Or you build a way to retain timestamped snapshots of all your files, every five minutes, so you can roll back anything - then find that huge log file that constantly changes gets snapshotted every time, and everything is hanging because of lack of disk space. Oh, production does get a lot more traffic to log, now I think about it.

Or you do any of a hundred other things that seem like simple, low risk operations until you realise they aren't.