I’ll give you the fact that the zombies not being recognized is pretty weak, and will almost certainly be updated lore-wise once we get working different fighting factions in. Once that goes in I’ll probably vote to switch over to a “bubbled area” around police stations where the bots have managed to maintain some sort of order by clearing out the zombies, but are still on kill-on-sight orders for most people. If anything I’d say the problem should probably be the opposite, that the bots were unable to tell the difference between people and zombies and as such applied the “zombie” template to everyone, living or dead.
But the time required to do a rollback on software isn’t necessarily something you would have when you have just set yourself as the enemy of an entire building full of robots. It’s not that a rollback wasn’t possible (up until the network collapsed, at least), it’s just that the people who were able to do so weren’t able to get one up prior to being eliminated by their own robots.
Imagine this scenario:
[hr]
The bombs have started to fall seemingly randomly, strange creatures have appeared and are killing everything they come in contact with, rioters that don’t seem to stay down are springing up everywhere, and there are even whispers of a potential biological attack on the US. You’ve heard that the army might be on it’s way to help support the local police structure, but can’t know for sure. Any contact with the higher command structures that you and the handful of other human police officers present manage to establish seems sketchy, and what word you have received advises police forces to consolidate around the stations and maintain what order they can. Panic is imminent and morale is low even among your officers, when a new update suddenly comes down from above, promising to help the bots deals with the many problems successfully.
As precinct leader you type your password in to verify the update, scan your police ID, say your name into the microphone, and then enter your password one more time. The screens go still as all the robots around the city pause for a few seconds while updating, then continue their work. A few seconds later Joe (who was getting some more coffee from down the hall) bursts into the room followed by about a dozen police bots that appear to have gone berserk, and all hell breaks loose. You quickly click on the rollback button and begin to type in your password to verify, but it’s too late and the bots come down on you before you are able to finish, leaving your last view of the screens showing the same thing beginning to happen all over the precinct.
Similar situations are happening in the other precincts as well. A few of them manage to successfully perform rollbacks and hold as bastions of order for a handful of hours more, but are unable to propagate the rollback throughout the rest of the network without administrator approval from above, which is unable to be obtained. Eventually, the inability of the rolled back bots to deal conclusively with any of the strange rioters proves to be their doom and they collapse under the weight of enemies that just won’t stay down.
