Sometimes your website is dead. Really dead. Designing a user experience can be hard, because there may be no way to gracefully recover.

Google Mail today:

Okay, so I tried again straight away (30 seconds is waaay too long to wait!):

I like the second message. It reassures me that my data is secure, and lets me know that I won't be able to use the site until it's fixed.

TelstraClear's error message from a while ago made me chuckle enough to save it to disk:

Thanks for the offer, but I'm finding it hard to enjoy the rest of the site when I'm in a popup window that has an error. I love the page title too: "Error (TelstraClear - Together, A better way)". Talk about empowerment! I don't think we did that error together.