Sounds like he fired every single employee on the spot. I can see the logic behind redirecting the site to a static asset when you have nobody to manage it.
I'm not talking about his logic, I'm talking about the logic of the person he asked to remove all of the content. That person was almost certainly an employee who was also laid off.
The content is still in their CMS somewhere. They just redirected the index to a different page. Could have even been someone who didn't work directly at DNAInfo. Ricketts employs a lot of people.
It doesn't matter. They still shouldn't have done it.
Their announcement is served by Route 53 and CloudFront. If AWS was also hosting their CMS, it could easily be gone now.