From how i read this, this is beyond their immediate control and certainly not related to the issues we faced for so long. THOSE at least seem to be mostly gone, so the answer would probably be: about a month or 6weeks ago or so!?!
Progress has been made. We were able to successfully bring up some of the other EU servers that went down - working on getting AB back up now.
For one hardware failure to affect multiple servers, I presume DB is referring to virtual servers. In that case they would concentrate on getting the basics up and running before concentrating on checking and restoring the specific server itself.
This is correct. My understanding is that the Ops team was working on get the piece of hardware that failed back up and running, and now is going through the work to fix up the individual servers (as this affected multiple EU servers across several of our titles). Work on AB should run through tonight over the next few hours.