so now that the dust has settled — it sounds like the last person with membership in the group that allows them to turn on writes to config-management left while writes were still locked, and the identity management that would allow them to get into the group is down (:
a little blue bird told us that the consequences we foretold w/r/t config management have come to pass, and the remaining sysadmins are, as we prophecized less than two weeks ago, rapidly entering the Cool Zone