Best Practices for Status Page Communication: Crisis Management 101

When your service is down, your users feel powerless. Your Status Page is the only way to give them back a sense of control.

Bad communication turns a technical glitch into a PR disaster. Good communication turns an outage into a demonstration of competence.

Rule 1: Be Fast (The “Acknowledged” Phase)

Don’t wait until you know the root cause to post. Post immediately.

• Template: “We are investigating reports of connectivity issues with the API. Our team is looking into it.” This stops users from flooding your support inbox. They see you know. They wait.

Rule 2: Be Honest (The “Identified” Phase)

Don’t say “Scheduled Maintenance” if it crashed. People aren’t stupid. Don’t hide the scope. If data was lost, say it.

• Template: “We have identified the issue. A database migration failed, causing lock contention in the US-East region. We are rolling back the migration now.”

Rule 3: Be Predictable (The “Update” Phase)

“We will provide the next update in 30 minutes.” Then, update in exactly 30 minutes. Even if the update is “No new news.” Silence creates panic. Regular heartbeats create calm.

Rule 4: The Post-Mortem (The “Resolved” Phase)

After the fix, explain what you did to prevent it from happening again.

• Template: “The issue has been resolved. We are implementing a new pre-flight check in our CI/CD pipeline to prevent this class of migration errors in the future.”

The Tone of Voice

Empathetic but Technical.

• Too Casual: “Whoops! Gremlins in the server!” (Unprofessional).
• Too Corporate: “Service disruption detected.” (Cold).
• Just Right: “We apologize for the interruption. We know you rely on us, and we are working hard to fix this.”

Use Cluster Uptime’s incident templates to have these pre-written. Don’t try to write coherent English while the server is burning.