It's unclear how big a deal this outage was, as I can never make heads or tails of what's really behind an article in the The Register. That said, I run an app

It's unclear how big a deal this outage was, as I can never make heads or tails of what's really behind an article in the The Register. That said, I run an app on Heroku and noticed that outage - Pingdom sent me a bunch of emails, which I saw after a day spent outside. The first thing I do when I get a Pingdom failure notice is check status.heroku.com, and sure enough they had an issue and were working on fixing it. I wasn't particularly expecting there to be mention of it on HN because, first, it wasn't an enormous outage, second, it was on the weekend, and third Heroku always does such a great job of posting about issues. I don't know if they did so, but I'd expect Intercom.io and other affected sites to post information letting people know that the site is down and why. I haven't tried it yet but Heroku allows you to specify a custom error page to be served [1], which you could update on the fly to let people know what's going on. For other outages I have let users know via Twitter and Facebook, though obviously there's no substitute for a nice up-to-date static error page. [1] http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/custom_error_pages http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/custom_error_pages