I have not been able to find an option for AWS ELB to show a fail whale-style system message when servers are failing to reassure customers that we are working on the problem.
The best we can come up with is to set a micro-ec2 instance and then monitor server health with a daemon or cron job or using monit, and bring up this micro instance when all servers are down.
Are there any other more elegant solutions to this problem?
Route 53 can check your site and redirect users to a fail page for you. If its static, you could host this page on s3.