The
http://www.microchip.com.edgekey.net/forums/ alias is down also and the main site is up on both the usual URL and the alias, so that points to a forum server issue. I suspect that if it was down intentionally, the admins would have put up a status page, so its either connectivity at the server end or a server crash. Having seen just how cruddy ASPplayground/APG vNext has been over the years, my money's on a server crash, possibly triggered by an anti-spam filter using to many resources.
Surely Microchip can afford an on-call admin, + an alert system that triggers on exceptionally high or low posting rates?
Not doing anything except during office hours after the Arizona staff have had their morning coffee is no way to run web services for a multinational corporation. And why doesn't the forum have a landing page on the main server with the forum status? It would be helpful to know if outages are scheduled maintenance, unscheduled maintenance or other, with an ETA for it coming back up if known.