One thing I would like to point out: Going from 100 hits a day to over 10,000 hits a day does NOT look like regular traffic. If anything, it looks more like bot activity than anything, which is definitely against the ToS, and would be plenty reason to shut down your account.
I'm not in the position to do so, but if I ran an advertisements, and suddenly saw 100x the regular users hitting the site, I'd be pulling the ads.
If you're paying by the click and the clicks are not fraudulent (and the amount of traffic says nothing about it being fraudulent or not) then there is no reason to pull the account if the traffic goes up.
Google's ad-insert can see the referrer field; they can confirm that the site is really linked from the originating site. With their toolbar and analytics data and giant AdSense network, they know better than anyone how much traffic an outlink from these sites sends.
So while they know the surge is different, they should also know exactly how it's different, and that it's not "bot activity". Holding back ads from all such ephemeral traffic would make sense -- and serving appropriate lower-value ads the most sense -- but banning the account does not.
I'm not in the position to do so, but if I ran an advertisements, and suddenly saw 100x the regular users hitting the site, I'd be pulling the ads.