I doubt that since it’s their own code but I’d easily believe that it hits an API endpoint which just started malfunctioning. The description is vague but it appears to retrieve a bunch of different kinds of information from some Apple service. Clearly a massive test coverage miss if my speculation is right.
It's partially a joke, but as anyone who has worked with a complex system, things like this can happen. A privacy control is changed somewhere, but not activated until later, and suddenly one day something stops working.
