Fortunately some witnesses were still letting transactions through without verifying the transactor had sufficient RC. The RC system doesn't require consensus, so if a producing node puts a transaction into the blockchain, the other nodes will accept the transaction even if their own internal calculations show that the transactor didn't have enough RC.

This enabled us to still do some Steem transactions, although at first only somewhat on an unreliable basis. We then increased the expiration time on our wallet transactions so that our transactions would last long enough to get included by one of those witnesses as a stopgap measure until we recovered enough RC (and that also allowed us to take advantage of the first-time power-down bug to get a bit more RC a bit quicker). Needless to say, we had a busy night yesterday.