Romeo - 12:01 pm on Jun 11, 2008 (gmt 0)

But why would the domain owner in effect switch of their website.

The status of a website is independent of the flags set in the domain name registry to protect the domain name.

Perhaps their webserver is broken. Or got hacked. Or their hoster screwed up, or went out of business. Or their DNS provider screwed up (you didn't tell 'how' the site is offline).

Perhaps they had these domain name status flags since
Creation Date: 13-aug-2004
but they just lost their server's hard disk last week.

Seems unrelated to me.

Btw, many active .ORG, .BIZ, .INFO or .NAME domains have at least the
Status: clientTransferProhibited
set.

Kind regards,
R.