Writing Incident Updates
Clear communication builds trust during outages.
Update Structure
What happened
Describe the issue in user terms:
- "Users may experience slow page loads"
- "API requests are failing with 500 errors"
What you know
Share what you've discovered:
- "We've identified increased database latency"
- "A configuration change caused the issue"
What you're doing
Explain your response:
- "Our team is rolling back the deployment"
- "We're scaling up additional servers"
What's next
Set expectations:
- "We expect resolution within 30 minutes"
- "We'll provide an update in 15 minutes"
Example Updates
Investigating
"We're aware of reports of slow performance and are investigating. We'll update within 15 minutes."
Identified
"We've identified the issue as a database failover. We're restoring service and expect full recovery within 20 minutes."
Resolved
"The issue has been resolved. All services are operating normally. We'll publish a post-mortem within 48 hours."