" we have not completely restarted the index subsystem or the placement subsystem in our larger regions for many years. S3 has experienced massive growth over the last several years and the process of restarting these services and running the necessary safety checks to validate the integrity of the metadata took longer than expected"
This is analogous to "we needed to fsck, and nobody realized how long that would take".
This is analogous to "we needed to fsck, and nobody realized how long that would take".