I don't do twitter, but if you go to the AO3 home page when something weird is happening, there's a box with latest otw tweets for updates (as far as I know, it's the only way to see them unless you're actually on twitter). So whenever something happens, I look there first, though they don't always do that right away or it's obviously something only I'm having.

I'm not sure which browser you use, but I've never had the bar come back unless I was completely logged out. But I tend to leave my browsers open, logged in, and sleep the computer rather than turn it off, when I'm working a lot.