...the hell happened here? I take a week-long holiday and the whole place blows apart in the meantime.

Hundreds of thousands of posts - some of which was brilliant stuff that took its authors a lot of time and effort to put together - all gone for good, in an instant.
James' brilliant re-watching threads, original (often heated) reactions to TNT's Dallas as it aired, the classic movies thread, the Peyton Place thread, our discussions of Empire, Revenge and other recent soaps, political discussions like Brexit, Ome's threads - especially the Melrose one which I thought was great fun, my own Colbys development thread...
And, as I see, some of the members whose posts I loved reading appear to have disappeared, at least for the time being, along with the content. I'm glad everyone's in the re-building mode, but the loss is just incredibly sad. I struggle to fathom it.