I wasnt really paying attention to the outage, but if it was indeed a routing issue, then you shouldnt have been able to reach any godaddy ip address. ICMP/traceroutes would have failed and showed the error.
I don't know the details of the environment, but even in smaller systems I've worked on there is a fair bit of hardware separation between various network segments. Complete failure on one part would not affect the others.
For that matter, even a slight corruption in some ARP caches, or stale internal tables, etc., could cause the problems they had... it's not just a complete failure that could cause problems.
And "routing" is such a generic term, when it could really be any number of feature sets that failed; load balancing, source routing configs, etc.