Are you sure about this? I was under the impression that, in general, IBM technology was not being used. Although I don't have 100% confidence in my sources on this.

I'm inclined to disagree with any forgiving position on AC's performance, speaking as an IT practioner for the past 4 decades. If my company experienced these sorts of problems during alpha testing, we would be taking a pretty serious look at why our unit testing failed. For something like this to happen during beta testing would almost certainly be cause for personnel changes. It this happened in production ... well, it wouldn't matter much, we'd probably be out of business.

On the other hand, AC might have made a deliberate decision just to implement the changes without performing a full test and let the customers find the errors. There's no better test environment than the real one. This might not be a very good approach for the company image, but it can save a lot of time and money.