They waited until morning in China ? - at software companies I've worked at they would have woken people up for something as major as this. This isn't the sort of thing where you want to be caught behind the news cycle.
Why wake some developer to check if the code actually looks similar to the competitor. who then would get back to you, then you contact some other people to decide what to do and then you contact the Infrastructure guy to take the site offline.
The outcome: the site would have been taken out a few hours earlier.
I don't think this situation warranted such measures, the PR nightmare had already begun. This way they were able to analyze the situation, contact the guilty vendor and do a preliminary investigation before deciding to take the site offline instead of doint it as a kneejerk reaction.
Those few hours can be critical when you're trying to stay ahead of the news cycle, because you have to race with news deadlines (at newspapers, PR wires, tv stations, etc.)
The difference of a few minutes can be the difference between a minor story of "Microsoft withdraws website over legal issue" and a major story "Scandal: Microsoft rips off competitor; ignores allegations".
Geeks embbeded in a 24-hour web-newscycle often forget that most of the worlds news cycle still revolves around newsroom deadlines.
