It's set to GMT, but you can edit your profile and select your local time zone there.

It's running just fine for me right now. Looks like they've turned off some of the graphics and colors to speed things up. Friday night I could not get in at all.

When you click on FlyerTalk Forums, you'll see how many people are logged on. It seems the more logged on, the slower it will get. Right now there are 321 people using FT, but I've seen it up in the 700's quite a bit. It runs really fast when there's less than 200 people logged on.

Once you set up your forums in My FlyerTalk, it will save having to navigate around. You'll find all your preferred forums on one page.