In addition to our website maintenance page tutorial, we've decided to publish our collection of the most creative and original maintenance page designs from across the web. We believe that this is the largest collection ever assembled.
As you may already know, a maintenance page can be a simple textual one, explaining to the visitor why the website is currently unavailable and when it will be back online. But sometimes designers take a non-trivial approach and create these pages with maximal creativity, making them non-boring, clever, and funny pieces of art.
Here are the examples of maintenance pages of the most popular websites along with the most non-standard maintenance pages we've stumbled upon. We hope that these bright ideas can be your source of inspiration in creating your next excellent webpage designs.
Apple
One of the most valuable brands in the world. Solid and simple.
Apple on black
Apple's black version of the maintenance page.
Atlassian
This is not a static image, wait for the animation!
The Beaverton
The Beaverton is a news satire and parody publication. The maintenance page matches their style. No Macedonian hackers involved.
Simple and utilitarian. Facebook is too serious to joke.
Flickr
The team at Flickr uses a famous photo from their collection. "Bad, bad panda! Flickr is down for panda planned maintenance."
Flickr in 2004
In 2004 Flickr had "a massage" sometimes:
Flickr in 2005
That was the wrong power switch!
Github
Octocat (the GitHub mascot) can repair everything.
Github in 2008
This is how their maintenance page looked in 2008 when they were "moving to new faster, better hardware". A maintenance video, like in our maintenance page example, was included.
Google Wave
Google Wave was discontinued in 2010, but its maintenance page design still gives positive emotions.
Grooveshark
Grooveshark doesn't exist anymore too, but their maintenance page is here for its fun and creativity.
Hasbro
Clean and simple.
Hootsuite
Owls at work.
Hootsuite in 2009
While you are waiting, here are some facts about owls…
Investopedia
Fair enough: maintenance page is an “inconvenient webpage designed to alert users that something has gone amiss with the page they're trying to access. Usually, these messages are accompanied by a sincere apology from the development team for having dropped the ball”.
iStockphoto
The monster octopus from iStockphoto.
iStockphoto Jay
This is Jay from iStockphoto. He offers coupon codes with a 10% discount during the site maintenance.
Sit tight while Linkedin is cleaning things up.
Linkedin in 2009
In the past, there was a wizard involved.
Mixx
Mixx was a user-driven social media site until 2011. While "napping" offline, their maintenance page was featuring some stories which were still available to visitors:
Mozilla
Repairs in progress.
MySpace
In 2006 myspace.com was the largest social network in the world and the most visited website in the United States. Here's the packman game on their maintenance page from that time:
Ning
Ning's experienced technicians (pictured) are currently hard at work so as to bring Ning back online shortly.
Nykaa
Nykaa is an Indian retail seller of beauty, wellness, and fashion products. “We are at the spa for a quick beauty upgrade”. Sweet!
Opensubtitles
Opensubtitles is movie-related, this is why they have some kind of superhero on their maintenance page. (Write a comment if you know who it is).
Product Hunt
A cute cat wearing Google Glass tells us that Product Hunt is down.
Reddit employees are very creative, this is why they have many variations of the maintenance page design.
Reddit is down
You could always go outside or something.
Down, Reddit is
Maintenance foretold, was.
Reddit Emergency Maintenance
Reddit in 2006
This is how the maintenance page looked like in 2006. "We're upgrading to jQuery!” (How outdated that sounds now).
Revver
Revver was a video-sharing website that hosted user-generated content. Closed in 2011.
Slate
Maintenance page of slate.org
SoundCloud
SoundCloud will be up soon and the sun will shine again:
Stackoverflow
Some kind of a memory dump here.
Toboc
“Take a break, rest your eyes and have a cup of coffee”
Tumblr
A modest message to the people of Earth.
Twitter has had a variety of maintenance pages, below is a small anthology of them. The first one features their famous Fail Whale.
Twitter in 2007
“The site should kick itself back into gear...”
Twitter cat
“Our scheduled maintenance got off the schedule.”
Twitter in 2008
“It's cool, I can chill.”
Twitter in 2011
A few changes since 2008.
Twitter in 2012
Here we can see the evolution of the background.
Vmware
Rather informative.
Yahoo! Groups in 2011
An official message from the Yahoo! Groups Plumber.
YouTube in 2006
“We'll be back as soon as we figure this out...” I guess it was before the Google acquisition.
YouTube in 2006
“We're busy pushing out some new concoctions and formulas.”
YouTube in 2006
“Please stop calling the office, we're trying to work in here.”
YouTube in 2007
A layman's explanation of YouTube.
YouTube in 2007
It was hard to be a YouTube engineer in 2007...
Do you know other interesting maintenance pages worth mentioning? Tell us in the comments below.
