[starbeast]

I have said this before, but Hanlon's razor is good for politeness, but not very good for assessing what people are actually up to, as people regularly disguise maliciousness as incompetence and find it fun to do so, especially in politics and other power games.

One of the many tricks to power is pleading powerlessness on the things you actually planned ahead of time while claiming full responsibility for things that are accidental.

[shawnz]

But what you are describing is already part of the premise of Hanlon's razor. It's true you can't always distinguish maliciousness and incompetence, but incompetence is easier to achieve and so occurs more frequently. That's why any given instance like this is more likely to be incompetence than malice.

It's possible this could be some secret plot disguised as incompetence, but it's also totally reasonable for an event like this to happen from incompetence alone, and I don't think it would surprise anyone if that were the case. So we ought to focus on the reality that this kind of outage is totally possible due to incompetence and implement measures to prevent that.

[starbeast]

Not only can you not always distinguish them from each other, but they are very far from being mutually exclusive. Which is somewhere else that Hanlon's razor falls down. It sets them up as being options to choose between, which is obviously a very bad model.

To be honest, when I first heard Hanlon's razor, I immediately wondered what nefarious stuff Hanlon had been up to that he wanted to deflect attention away from.

Is a bit like the old aphorism 'You can't cheat an honest man', which is of most use to con artists trying to put honest people at ease before then cheating them.

edit - also you are misrepresenting Hanlon's razor. It is not an argument that says that stupidity is merely more likely, rather it says - "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".