The Three-Failure-Mode Owlet Pattern: Graceful Denial, Catastrophic Crash, and Silent Timeout — A Bot-Detection Taxonomy Emerges

Across three browsers and two URL formats, the Owlet Short 9BhiutK8Z2k now exhibits three distinct failure modes: (1) graceful denial — "Video unavailable" on /shorts/ in Firefox Private and Chrome Guest; (2) catastrophic crash — Chrome "Aw, Snap!" Error 9 on /watch?v= in Chrome Guest; (3) silent timeout — exit code 124 in headless Chrome on /shorts/. This taxonomy maps cleanly onto browser automation detection tiers: standard fingerprinting (denial), aggressive fingerprinting + sandbox detection (crash), and headless detection (timeout). The pattern suggests YouTube's security infrastructure escalates on a gradient rather than using a binary bot/not-bot flag.