Hanlon's Razor is, I believe, a good rule of thumb, but people keep using it in situations such as this one where it's not just potentially malice (wanting to harm someone for little other reason than wanting to see them hurt or wanting to hurt) but also greed/self-interest. Hanlon's Razor as stated makes sense to me. I see a lot more stupidity in the world than I see people wanting to hurt for no other reason. But greed? I see a lot of that.
Yeah, I think Hanlon's Razor was intended to apply to individuals, not organizations. Often the "stupidity" of an organization is a shield for malice or greed.
Organizations are made up of people. When you have 5000 people making small decisions with 0.1% possibility of being wrong, if have 40% of chance having at least one mistake over 5000 decisions.
People are not independent coin tosses. They coordinate, manage, overrule, scheme, discuss, and process information in strategic ways that render these kinds of extremely simplified models impossible.
Why do you think a bug is a "simpler" explanation for this behaviour? Maybe if all links were broken then sure, but if only specific sites that operate against the interests of Twitter stop working doesn't that point to something else going on?
An algorithm may have incorrectly marked a site as malicious, or crawling might be failing because of an malformed http header etc. Who knows...
When there is feedback loops involved (in the context of an integrity system, for example), it doesn't outright block everything. In the past work i had our systems blocked some publishers traffic wrongfully, while not blocking others when it should(i was in display ads).
