You may or may not think Verisign as registry is blameless / disreputable and to blame for this incident.
There is causation for incoherence between the authoritative and non-authoritative nameservers for a particular data set.
You may or may not think the gaining/losing registrars are blameless / disreputable for this incident.
There is causation for provisioning state change triggers to the database used to construct a particular data set published by the authoritative nameservers for that particular data set.
Tou may or may not think that ICANN gTLD policy is blameless / disreputable for this incident.
There is causation for policy and mechanism that is articulated in end-to-end transactions between registrants, intermediate entities, and registries. These are not mutually exclusive. Blame and repute are secondary to the correct reconstructions of causations. Eric