One guy's password getting out, in the grand scheme of things, is perhaps not an "epic failure". I mean, it's a screwup all right, but perhaps some perspective is in order...
The point is more towards developers/sysadmins. Outputting error handling is an epic failure in any production environment.
If that's "epic", what about those companies that lost tons of credit card numbers? Or the Therac that killed people? You'll run out of superlatives if "epic" is putting some debug information on the screen in a production environment.
And how do you suspect those credit cards were lost? Bad practices? This would be one of them. The semantics behind the the title doesn't really matter. At the end of the day, its just a bad idea.
No one is saying that it's not a bad idea. I'm just quibbling with the superlative-inflation going on in the headline.