Re: Hmm...
"Whilst the 123-reg VPS product is an unmanaged service, we have committed a large number of resources to help restore services back to normal as quickly as possible"
You're more temperate than I would be (even though I moved away from 123-reg a long time ago due to this sort of attitude). I'd be spitting nails! It's almost, but not quite, saying "you know what, guys - we can run a script and delete all your data and we don't have to do anything about it. it's all down to you to recover. But we will do something about it, because we're good guys. Here's a video of a fluffy bunny eating a carrot to amuse you, which again, we didn't have to provide but we did because we're the good guys."
While I accept that customers not taking their own backup us a little foolish, it's bordering incompetent for a service provider to not provide service assurance through maintenance, period. They're doing the work which has risk, they should have a mitigation plan in place in case of error causing this sort of issue, else they need to make it very clear in terms of service that there is no guarantee at all of service delivery, which would turn most people with flourishing businesses away from them as a provider.
While I'm on the subject, and since you brought up marketing, do you think in a few days 123-reg will turn around and say "ha ha, no one was impacted at all, it was all a joke to get our company talked about", just like the rm -rf guy? Would anyone actually go to a company that pretended to be incompetent in order to get their name in the news? Personally, I wouldn't...