That was clearly intended to permanently damage/destroy the equipment.
Coding a time bomb into the website would be illegal, but they can't force you back to work to fix a bug/outage that happens to occur during the strike.
Just saying, if it's built acceptably well, it shouldn't require engineers putting out fires constantly to not go down. But I'm sure you're right that I'm underestimating the complexity of the system as it's been constructed.
And I guess it's not the case that no one is touching anything, it's being updated constantly.
In particular, tomorrow night is going to have a lot of things needing rapid tweaking; some random county in Missouri is gonna somehow have an emoji in their election count CSV because someone hit the wrong key, some new microservice will choke under the once-every-four-years load, etc.
Coding a time bomb into the website would be illegal, but they can't force you back to work to fix a bug/outage that happens to occur during the strike.