There is additional informaton on the blog death here though the question of why is not addressed. Sheng’s link will eventually lead you there, so thanks!

Microsoft is being terribly short-sighted. I always thought Michael was being very pro-MS even when he was critical. No person or company is perfect, and Michael’s blog did much to humanize Microsoft IMO, both his positive and negative posts. And relatively few of his voluminous posts could be construed as negative. If MS is now going all Apple on us, that is just going to make people unhappy – with Microsoft.

Meantime, much of the old blog has been captured by the Internet Archive, as noted by Mike Laughlin above. But it is difficult to find a given blog post that way as full text search on the archive is not currently possible. So the data still exists, it is still relevant, but Microsoft has made it difficult to access by removing it from their servers. Does Microsoft think people will love them for this? Whatever Michael did to get himself banned, the damage Microsoft is doing to themselves with this boneheaded move is far worse.

Depending on the offense (what could be that bad?), I can see where Microsoft might tell Michael to stop blogging. Remove the offending post if you must, but to remove the entire blog is just shooting themselves in the foot.

Finally, there is more than one helpful answer in this thread. Is there a way to honor that by marking more than one reply as an answer?