How does a website get stolen?

[syntax]

Wow okay. I can see how it could happen, but really wouldn’t have thought it would happeb to something as big and organised as google.

Having worked in some pretty large companies, under the hood it is very often a mess.
Simple things like handover between resources, mail forwarding and everyone rushing to do stuff often means an absolute nightmare in keeping things going.
Another easy one that often gets messed up is cert renewals, even with all the automation, tooling and everything else, almost everywhere I know has missed cert renewals for critical items at some point

 

[syntax]

So what would have happened here? Stolen and pointed to nothingness? What is the point?

Stolen and resold back to the owners at a pretty high fee based on the value of the site / domain
Stolen and copied, you could get user logins and passwords, if sophisticated or lacking in security on the original side, this could be used quite effectively, or the usernames / passwords could have other value in terms of identifying users through email, and reusing those passwords with other accounts elsewhere they may have (many many people reuse passwords)

 

[Progenix Oj101]

Stolen and resold back to the owners at a pretty high fee based on the value of the site / domain

I had a completely unique, 20+ character alphanumeric password which I've just made a bit longer

If it's stolen, surely your host can recover it without the ransom?