Notice that only duplicates are pulled. Is that easy enough?
Did you miss the beginning of this little fracas? All the threads were pulled because multiple moderators were working independently (does this strike you as a smart way to do things? Think this situation might crop up again?). When they realized the error, one was restored. But by that time the conversation was pretty exclusively "what's happening to all these threads?"
I don't think you were on line for a fairly harrowing 20 minutes (?) when everytime the story would go up, it would disappear immediately - I am sure that in the sequences of refreshes and whatnot, it may have always been up, if you were lucky enough to be in the right window. I wasn't, several times
From my vantage, trying to grab a bite of lunch and freep, the problem was that I couldn't tell whether something truly bad had happened - or whether we had a singularly bad Drudge blue light special hoax going.
In the tension that is part of the last month, we are all a bit more susceptible to the call of the Reynolds Wrap of course. But it was truly unsettling to see it happening on FR.