Why are your customers exposed to this? This sounds like a tough problem that I'm sympathetic to for you personally, but it sounds like there's no failover or appropriate redundancy in place to rollover to while you work to fix the problem.
edit: I hope this comment doesn't sound accusatory. At the end of the day I want everyone to succeed. I hope there's a silver lining to this in the post-mortem.
edit: I hope this comment doesn't sound accusatory. At the end of the day I want everyone to succeed. I hope there's a silver lining to this in the post-mortem.