Several times, including last night around 1am DST I got this message:

Scheduled Maintenance Underway

The scheduled maintenance is underway while we prepare the network for the upcoming phpBB3 software. As posted, this is expected to last 6-8 hours from the starting time of 10:00 PM PST. Thank you,

This has happened several times over the past couple months. Is it real or just my computer having fun?

It's real. :)

Thanks. I didn't think this computer had a mind of its own.....yet.

they seem to be *trying*, but not very successful... :-P
Sometimes they also forget updating their error messages.
I've been receiving "we've finally found the database problem, please wait while we bring the second DB server back online" error message a couple of times.

Most PHP software is crap. Good looking, easy to setup, insanely popular crap. And I guess that a big installation such as freeforums probably is is suffering heavily from all kinds of bugs in the phpBB codebase.