Back when I was working as Support for @lukestokes' FoxyCart, I remember being tasked with sending personal emails to customers that were affected by errors and outages. In it, we included a detailed explanation of what went wrong, and we even sifted through the database to find the exact transactions that were affected. Granted, that's what's needed for an e-Commerce company, but the way it's handled (especially behind the scenes) is just so meticulous. Some of my work was off-hours to cater to non-US customers, but Luke and his co-founder Brett would go online mere minutes after the error and would get on it as soon as they can.
They would send out notifications and inform the customers that the company is aware of the error and are working hard to solve it. Attacks and outages cannot be avoided, so the best course of action is to keep the lines of communications open to reassure customers that they're not being forgotten. I don't work for FoxyCart anymore, so I'm not patting my own back. But, the experience during outages has truly become a benchmark of mine in terms of how to properly handle those kinds of situations. Sure, there were frustrated customers (that can't be avoided), but they remained as customers because of the compassion towards their plight.
I just wanted to put this out there as a testimonial that Luke knows what he's talking about with regard to situations like this. I spent hours yesterday thinking that it's a problem on my end. The lack of communication from Steemit Inc has been a real sore spot for me for quite some time now.
The least that could be done is to have that sort of status notification to tell people that the situation is being addressed. I really like @nanzo-scoop's suggestion for a mascot.