Steve,
We needed as full staffing as possible for the changeover, to handle phone calls, and be available. We have users in 35 countries, so in fact 4:00pm Pacific time is actually a very ideal downtime. What was scheduled to be a simple 15 minute changeover turned into a situation where everything that could go wrong did. I find it interesting that you would possibly compare us to your IT, which over 10 years has still struggled with some incredibly basic tasks.
Everything is online now, and all users cloud data has been migrated to four server locations across the globe, all synchronized in near real-time. User with perhaps a little more understanding and patience, will have seen no visible change, as everything has been quietly and perfectly migrated on the backend, with no action required.
Obviously if we had any reason to believe it would be anything more than a minor disruption, we would have done as you said, within reason. But we had users complaining at 11pm last night, and 4am this morning, so I'm not sure when you feel there is an ideal time for a service outage, or even a way to communicate such an outage to people who are not our employees on our same network. Anyway, going forward we should have only highly remote incidents of any outages, coupled with the ability to scale up to address increases in usage loads. It was a very large undertaking, and a very long night last night, it's too bad you aren't more understanding.
--J