I think you’re thinking of the Winter of Our Missed Content. That was one time we lost a few weeks/months of content. I do recall knowing ahead of time that it was going to happen and the place turning into The Purge for a little while, but I can’t say for sure if these were both the same incident.
The Winter of Our Missed Content happened back in 2001-2002, I was nearing the end of college and not spending a lot of time on the board. There’s a number of threads on the subject if you want to pick through them, but I’m sure others here remember it much better than I do.
My only real memory from that time is writing some big long GQ question about scratch-off ticket probabilities, it disappeared before I got an answer and I never felt like re-writing it.