It's either unprofessionalism on their part (an update broke something) or the mechanics involved Suddenly! stopped working as the database grew past certain limit.
I mean you have a nice system and everything works fine... until the script starts falling due a time-out or the server explosively dead-locks due to overload. And you, as a programmer maintaining that stuff have an epic "OH SHI..." moment because you only have time to realize how deep you are as the problem is unsolvable without adding more horsepower to the server (costly!) or reworking the whole code base (needs time to complete! deadline yesterday! no sleep! argh!) and you solve it by (quietly and uncospicuously) turning off some resource-heavy feature. Presto, the server shows signs of life again