Frankly, I don't buy this explanation - technically or logically both from a devops,and systems architecture level - There is no way in hell a company like Meta is pushing database design changes this significant to production? We all know how many times these database architecture changes get run in staging,then even production subsets before rolling out to production at large.

Should we assume the teams working to ensure Business Continuity & Applications Resiliency redundancies fell asleep at the wheel?

Also, to assume that no down or outage messaging go out during a fairly routine maintenance based outage?

I call BS

Lol I can't find scenario where this happens, at this scale at a company of Meta's scale...