The forum wasn't down for maint and it wasn't being moved anywhere. The provider who is hosting the forum and associated database had some issues with the respective systems, and when they were brought back up, some software version mismatches were creeping in and had to be figured out. As it had been running smoothly for almost five years on the same infrastructure, admins had to refresh their own knowledge about the bells and whistles of it.
I'll not link this statement to any other part of the discussion, but, as a personal comment, I think some of the conclusions drawn here go a little bit to far.
As for the forum being a "critical business tool", I'm certainly ok seeing it called a "very valuable resource", but in terms of criticality, I may want to remind you that it does not come with a SLA, neither on its operations nor on response times, and it never has. So building on it as a "critical" factor for anything would not really stand any formal compliance testing.
Cheers from Internet Security Days,
Florian.