Once upon a time, I worked for a social networking site where, in the early days, we had to take the whole site down for database migrations for hours at a time

Once upon a time, I worked for a social networking site where, in the early days, we had to take the whole site down for database migrations for hours at a time (the longest was the migration that allowed us to break free of this pattern, ironically). During the downtime we had a breakout game load instead of the site. The funny part? We would get legitimate complaints when the site came back that the game was gone. We had to keep it up on an alternate page just so we could direct those people to it.