It's not hard to create a customised 404 error message. Possibly just something that redirects to status.livejournal.com - I suspect that that might allay the worries of established users as well; most others I've spoken to during these downtimes don't know about the status page.
*shrugs* Anyway... this just occured to me. (I posted it here instead of lj_dev, because it seemed to be more of a business user-relations issue than a development issue.)
