That misses the point of the article, and misses what they learnt. The point isn't that a request was blocking the server. That's exactly not what happened. The point was that they couldn't handle the timeout of the non-blocking request they were making because there were so many other non-blocking events being processed before the timeout callback could be handled.
They could probably have solved this by scaling out, but I'm not going to fault their diagnosis or response.
They could probably have solved this by scaling out, but I'm not going to fault their diagnosis or response.