If you look at how modern equities markets handle a flash crash, there are now "circuit breaker" mechanisms that get triggered in response to a price decrease of over 10% during a five-minute window. Since a significant portion of trading in many markets today is algorithmic, without any safeguards in place, drastic movements can be quickly magnified even further.
That's not to say that I think magnified losses due to margin trades should be compensated for, but I feel like this is an attempt at apologizing for not having a formal enough policy for handling situations like this. Hopefully all other cryptocurrency exchanges take this event as a cue to develop formal policies for handling similar events in the future.
I'm curious what this will cost them...