The task at hand is to come up with a way to flag an application for an outage when MyUW is not down. If MyUW as a whole is down then they will be presented with the generic MyUW error page which is in place under /portal/500.html currently.
So right now the way people get into our MyUW applications is through /web. Which is handled by our layout manager. In uPortal 4.2 they introduced a life cycle of maintenance (uPortal-Project/uPortal#397). We could just flag the proper entity file for maintenance, and in the tomcat manager shut down the webapp. That should prevent people from seeing the application. Then if they deep link to it, it would show the 404 page which should suggest they go to / to find what they are looking for. That could be a simple enough solution if a single app goes down when MyUW is still up. This seems to happen very rarely. We may have to tweak the /web/
to deal with things in a maintenance state.