From our perspective, it was a matter of helping our partner and the Ruby community succeed.

We're working really hard to make Ruby on Rails succeed. This is just one of the many ways that we've pitched in to help it do so.

If, during that downtime, when the "Twitter's problems are Ruby on Rails" FUD was running high, would anyone believe that a Github scale failure wasn't a Ruby on Rails problem? We weren't willing to test it, so we solved the problem, i.e. we put our money where our mouth is -- That Ruby on Rails scales just fine, the bottlenecks are generally elsewhere.