THe Reason why the forums were down - HARD DRIVE FAILURE!!!! From ZUNI (Anandtech WEbmaster):
If you noticed today we had an outage for about an hour, this is at least the 5th IBM drive that has died in our servers. We'll be replacing them with either Maxtor or Western Digital by the end of this week. Just to let you guys know, might help future hardware purchases until IBM sorts out their quality control issues.