I'm not a huge fan of conspiracy theories, but starting a 240 hours closure, ending it after 4, and claiming it was a test? What sort of testing are they doing that they were off by two orders of magnitude about the duration?

Who knows. Maybe the system was malfunctioning and they didn't know how long it would take to shut it down. More likely the admin is just blabbing the first thing they think will shut everyone up.

Someone probably briefly thought they brought Skynet online via AI powered drones.