I don't know the official answer, but at about 1-2pm today the forum was being spammed with racist posts from a user called "nukeafrica2", a member who has been banned several times before under other racist names.
At that point in time, it was between 5-9am in America, so Hoj was the only mod online, and since he can't ban accounts, he was stuck trying to clear them all.
Apparently each post was posted from a different IP, most definitely proxies, so stopping the user isn't possible since all it takes is to find another insecure proxy, which is easy to do, and start posting again.
Then i went offline to watch a movie and stuff, came back about 6pm and the forums were closed.
I don't know the exact reason, but if you put 2 and 2 together, i think they're related.
*EDIT: Checking back through IRC logs.
[16:25] <@NemesisZero> A short notice: Everyone, check the announcments forum *now*.
[16:27] <@NemesisZero> Something's hogging bandwith, we need to identify it.
[16:27] <[On-Air][FFT]Cartman2b> Ah
[16:27] <[On-Air][FFT]Cartman2b> PT files?
[16:28] <@NemesisZero> Unlikely.
I can only presume that the forums were under some sort of DOS attack. Or 3.0 is ready to be released, which i entirely doubt since at present NS:C isn't even working.
*EDIT: And just now:
[20:02] <+Comprox> its not coming out
[20:03] <+Comprox> something is chewing up the bandwidth on the forums, probably remote linking
