An entire data center is becoming unrecoverable, but they had 3 days of advance notice to pull drives and bring up servers somewhere else. Don't people plan to have redundant data centers?
This wasn't a surprise storm, and it wasn't "more severe than expected" - this has been national news for a while. More it was "eh, we'll be alright, why pay for something and not use it, we'll just apologize later".
