I had also faced the issue where the forum took too long to open than normal. Might be there may be too many people trying to access the site due to which server may got crashed or some maintenance happening on server due t which it might be taking some time. Now everything seems to be fine.
It's either the servers couldn't handle the number of users (and alternate accounts 
) that are online or are logging in, or we're probably getting DDoSed. Bitcointalk has been like this for me in the past few days. Unfortunate.