They DO state that they are taking on new staff AND reprogramming the whole thing.
This makes me thing 24 hours was a massively low estimate, and they just couldn't get the work done. How many I.T. projects don't come in late? ..answer is, almost all of them, especially those with 0 fault requirements.
You hear what you say? Good development not need to shutdown the live site. They not have a test environment and when the new code is ready and tested just will update to the live server? Of course it is possible to stop the site for a while but not so long as you try to say.