[maxerickson]

I realize there is no one that speaks for bitcoin, but here you have someone announcing to merchants to not process transactions until the fork was resolved (the post refers to a discussion on #bitcoin-dev):

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=152030.0

If you're a merchant: please stop processing transactions until the chains converge.

So there is room to argue about how patio11 phrased that, but it seems fair enough to say that advice from the insiders was to stop using it for a while (and given that the fork was resolved in keeping with the results of the discussion, I think it is fair to say that there really are insiders).

Saying not to use the network has pretty much all the same problems as making it unavailable (and the additional problem that it is confusing for the bad state to be available but not recommended for use).