Incident communication without guesswork
Communicate impact early, publish factual updates while work continues, and close every incident with a clear recovery record customers can trust.
Explore incident management Start freeThe operating model during an outage
Incident communication is the discipline of giving customers accurate service-impact information while response work is in progress. It is not a postmortem, a support reply, or an internal alert stream.
StatusPage.me provides the product workflow for this process through incident management, published status updates, and subscriber notifications.
Five stages of credible incident communication
Acknowledge
Say that you are investigating an observed customer-facing issue.
Scope impact
Name the affected components and the customer actions at risk.
Publish updates
Record verified progress and set the next-update expectation.
Resolve
State when service recovered and whether monitoring continues.
Preserve history
Keep a timeline that supports trust, review, and later follow-up.
What good communication says
Useful update
API write requests are returning errors. Read requests remain available. We are applying mitigation and will update again by 09:30 UTC.
It states impact, separates working and failing behavior, and commits to the next update.
What it should avoid
- Publishing speculation as root cause.
- Leaving customers without a next-update time.
- Calling planned maintenance an outage without context.
- Hiding recovery timing once service returns.
Incident communication FAQ
Connect incident handling to public communication
Monitor services, publish incidents, notify subscribers, and preserve recovery history in one workflow.
Start free See incident features