I just saw it as someone throwing out a joke in the middle of handling a stressful situation. Reading his retrospective post on the matter, it sounds like he'd been trying to understand and address the situation all day and hadn't realized that the userbase at large didn't know that.

Given that most of the popular subreddits were offline for the day, I can't imagine anyone would seriously think they didn't care at all. Failing to address that situation would have been a great way to kill the site entirely.