Sorry for the downtime and we will try to communicate the problem better in the future.
You did the right thing, going down immediately.
The solution for the announcement problem is to do it “out of band”, as the communications engineers call it. That is: use a different medium. May be a webpage or even twitter or whatever. Ideally let everybody know your method in advance (make an announcement policy :-)) so the users know where to look for the info.