I imagine they are in "freaking out" mode from the publicity. Anything related to kiddie exploitation is black plague-like in the USA. It may seem irrational to expend the resources to filter, but it's one action they can take that has an immediate effect (perhaps not effective, however.)
Yah, downtime kills. A lesson learned from the e-commerce days, I suppose. OTOH, with everything in perpetual Beta, we're slowly becoming tolerant of it. Even the mighty Google has had issues.
It's not enough to have hawt developers, you need hawt sysadmins to keep that stuff running. :P