People champion pet projects all the time. At my company we joke that every major website UI redesign is just another VP pissing on the web portal fire hydrant.

Without a key person to pitch the value of this project's continued existence it got killed.

Edit: If MS is anything like the BigCo I work at those servers are gonna be wiped and re-imaged after a bunch of automated "these servers were owned by X who has left the company, do you still need them?" emails are ignored by X's boss.

I ran their web site. When my job got outsourced, I got exactly four minutes notice before being shown the door. I was (and still am) the only one with the password for the domain registrar. The people who own the company have too much arrogance and pride to call me to ask for the password so they can give it to the Indian company that replaced me, so after several weeks of the web site not being updated with the current pricing (which changed almost daily), they opened a new domain.

As of last month, my site still sits there as a time capsule with the old pricing, employee bios, and everything from six years ago. I can understand why the domain hasn't changed, because they paid for 10 years in advance. But I don't know why they're still paying the hosting bill.

The company was run poorly and the passwords to most services were held by random people in the company. He did get the key to the kingdom (the domain name) but he's just too incompetent to realize that with domain ownership he can just set up new email hosting and use password reset on all the services... Instead he keeps making legal threats to get things he trivially can get access to himself.

Nope. No severance. And as I mentioned, almost zero notice. Just "Turn in your badge," and my immediate boss telling me that the project was already outsourced a week earlier.

Something similar happened when I worked at a small town radio station in Wisconsin. This was back when computers were just coming to small business, and people set BIOS passwords and used those round keys to lock their computers. When I got shown the door, nobody asked me for the password or the key to my computer. They just said here's your last check, get out. I heard from one of the DJ's a few weeks later that they ended up chucking out the computer and buying a new one.

Microsoft told the FT the database was no longer available, because the person who curated it had now left the company.