It's nice to have them now. Please lock them so only the admins and CrypticOps can post in them. All the commentary and me-toos in those threads make them useless for ongoing updates on the outage. I'm not going to sit and reload or search the thread looking for another dev post among the 500 people whining, commenting and otherwise wasting space in the thread when you could just lock them so that a new post actually represents useful, relevant information.

At the very least it will cut the load on your forum server as the thousands of people who already know enough not to waste bandwidth don't have to reload page after page only to see people whining and demonstrating their ignorance about how computers work.