What would really help in these situations is a failover to our maintenance pages or some other static page we could provide instead of showing the Heroku "Application Error".
This is probably harder then it seems, especially when the outage is related to their routing infrastructure.
Well, there is an option to have error pages on your heroku domains, but that is probably dependent on at least a minimum level of the routing layer working.
Yeah, I have that setup but its not being used at the moment with this outage - if full redundancy with multiple regions is a huge challenge, perhaps some interim basic routing redundancy would go a long way so we could at least display a branded error page during an outage.
I agree. There is a very simple way to do this which I just posted (since it apparently hasn't occurred to Heroku). All they need to do is change the default app error message once they have confirmed they have a platform issue. So within a few minutes of an outage, a better message is displayed to our customers that does NOT make it look like we screwed up. http://blog.pardner.com/2012/06/dear-heroku-dammit-quit-blam...
This is probably harder then it seems, especially when the outage is related to their routing infrastructure.