Given they made a geopolitical accusations and dozens of mainstream publications repeated the "thousands of requests per second", this seems like a grossly negligent flub that should not be dismissed as a mere typo.

I frequently, alone, do 1000s of requests over a period of time, especially ones that are mostly cache hits, which can be $10-$50 in API costs.

This was not a "large scale" attack by any means.

[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45918638