I see lots of people using ELB for load balancing. Anyone tried using DNS on top of ELB to spread the load? That might just save you from the extended downtime.
Generally the ELB should have instances in different availability zones which are data centers miles apart. If your ELB went down creating a new one should be simple if you can access the region. The problem with high availability and spreading load is how to deal with your database and recovery.