You can serve your own error pages instead of Heroku's and show your boss whatever you want. They're specified as URLs, so they can be hosted on some other platform. I don't know if that feature works when AWS is failing Heroku, but if Heroku's up enough to serve the error page, maybe it's up enough to serve the error page you configured instead of its own.

https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/error-pages

Solid, thanks for the heads up!

Isn't it your fault you didn't build a fault tolerant application? The first rule of building services is assume everything is broken.

Honestly, I haven't the resources to guarantee site uptime, and have accepted this will happen as a result; my complaint was more targeted at the default error messages.

It seems this can be changed, though, fortunately for Heroku.

I guess my real point is your customer, 99% of the time, doesn't give a shit WHY your site is down. It just is.