When you know a significant number of your customers are impacted, get an initial message out. Write versions that will fit into an email, a status update, and even a tweet, and put them into your outage action plan.Īs you’re drafting your communications for an unplanned system outage, follow these 12 best practices. You’re working under pressure, often with limited information, and writing to an audience of justifiably upset people.ĭo your future self a favor and plan for surprises: think ahead about the most common types of outages, and come up with some sample communications. In my own career, writing status updates during major incidents have been some of the most nerve-wracking moments. You’ll also want to keep your status page on separate infrastructure to minimize the risk of an incident taking down your service and status page at the same time. Link to your status page prominently in key locations like your contact page, your support/operations Twitter account, and your help documentation.ĭuring an incident, push out messages on your primary support channels, acknowledging the issue and linking people to the status page as the source of updates. After all, your artisanal, exquisitely handcrafted status message means nothing to people who never see it, so wherever you store your status updates, make sure your customers know where to look. It’s also important to make sure your outage message is easily accessible. Inform the customer: Let them know what is happening and what that means for themīuild their confidence: Let them know the situation is being taken seriously and actively worked on so they can safely do other work in the meantime. In many cases, they also have their own customers that are asking them for answers.īy being an accurate, clear, and timely source of information, you can reduce their stress significantly. ![]() ![]() They are impacted by the outage, but they also have far less information about what is happening. The basic elements of great system outage messagesĭuring the stress of a major service outage, it’s easy to forget that your customers are often in an even more difficult situation.
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