This hasn't really anything to do with laziness or purposeful absence of staff. One of the main servers and therefore also the website (which uses Xenforo (presumably running from the same server)) are affected by, and this is only a guess, an external attack which in turn caused players, who were online at the particular moment when the server went down, not to be able to connect anymore. Just a theory. Again, the majority of the staff team is affected, just like 99% of the regular players and donators are.
Lol. Yeah, it was a joke. And as far as I know the robots are computer programs from like, google and such? I could be wrong though.