Apparently it was human error. The poor customer service rep just didn't know about the policy that should have let them help despite the expired subscription. I.e. the headline is massively exaggerating the story.
It's most visibly terrible and abusive in emergency/life-threatening situation but naturally people hate it all the time. The thing is that with emergency situations, the company will logically have overrides available - but because you'll have people often wanting to use "emergency" to get out from the ordinary problem of an expired car/device, the companies will make it hard to claim an emergency, hence some emergencies won't get caught.
And with the modern company organized on plausible deniability, those uncaught emergencies will look like "human error". And so the sycophants can say "nothing to see here, move on folks..."