Science is not a process of walking from one stepping stone of absolute, solid truth to another stepping stone of truth. Science is messy. Because the world is messy. Science is the process of observing the Universe as best we can given our limits and attempting to verify various models and conjectures about the way the Universe works. But along the way there are many potentials for pitfalls. Every experiment has a degree of error due to factors unrelated to what the experiment is trying to measure.
Published scientific papers are not like chapters in a text-book, they are merely the results of experiments. Sometimes it's possible to have experiments which seem to support one result or another but turn out to have some flaw or merely involve factors which we cannot explain yet. For example, we still don't know what "dark matter" actually is even though we have a pretty good idea that it does exist and some rough estimate of some of its properties. And for decades we did not know the origin of gamma ray bursts. It's the rare experiment that is definitive enough to provide unambiguous support or refutation for a specific theory, most experiments are somewhere in the middle, somewhat muddled, imperfect, and generally only gain strength once independently repeated and producing the same result.
Similarly, they didn't know what their results would be until after they ran the experiment. At that point, they can either: share the results, or hide the results. Hiding the results is the absolute worst thing that any scientist can do. The only time the option not to share the results would be acceptable is when they can be discredited or discounted (and sometimes they should still be shared). Since they couldn't discredit their results (they tried), they took the only responsible option remaining.
Indeed, they didn't just publish the results, they asked others to look for the bug. Like others have said, this is the best possible outcome.