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4 Copy-Pastable Incident Templates for Status Pages

Jan Tovarys
Updated on July 2, 2022

When an incident happens it's often necessary to share more information than just a simple red and green icon with an up/down status on your status page.

More insights generally help users to accommodate for the interruption and remove the need for any follow-up questions. But crafting a well-written incident update in the heat of a service outage is challenging. Incident communication templates save you stress and hassle.

Ready to use status page templates

Here are status page templates to consider for different use cases. Feel free to use them as they are or adjust them so they fit your specific use case.

Scheduled maintenance

Use this when you want to tell your users and customers to prepare for planned maintenance such as a database migration.

Note that the key to effective communication of maintenance is to let people know early. This can mean 3 days or several weeks depending on the scale of the maintenance and importance of your service.

Announcement message

[Your company name] will be performing routine maintenance on June 10 starting at 14:00 (UTC+1). You may not be able to access [company website] for a short period of time, but we’ll have things back up and running as soon as possible to minimize disruption to you.

In progress message

Scheduled maintenance is currently in progress. We will provide updates as necessary.

Completed message

The scheduled maintenance has been completed. Thank you for your patience!

Minor incident

Use this in case of an incident, where a small feature is not working correctly or where a small amount of users is impacted.

Investigating message

We’re having some trouble with [service affected]. We’re working to fix the problem as quickly as we can. We’ll share another update shortly.

Alternatively, you can provide a specific timeframe like 10 or 30 minutes - but be cautious as users might take your word for it.

Resolved message

We’re back! [service affected] should be up and running. Thanks for bearing with us.

Major incident

Use this in case of an incident, where a key feature is not working correctly or where a large amount of users is impacted.

Investigating message

We’re investigating an issue with [service affected] that is impacting some users. We’re working to fix the problem as quickly as we can. We’ll share another update shortly.

Resolved message

We’re back! [service affected] should be up and running. Thanks for bearing with us.

Complete downtime

Use this in case of an incident, where the whole service is down or when all of your users are impacted.

Investigating message

[service] is down for most users. We’re working to fix the problem as quickly as we can. We’ll share another update shortly.

Resolved message

We’re back! [service affected] should be up and running. Thanks for bearing with us.

Learn from the best

Want to know how the best companies communicate downtime? Check out some great examples of status pages and explore specific historical outages and how they were communicated.

Author's avatar
Article by
Jenda Tovarys
Jenda leads Growth at Better Stack. For the past 5 years, Jenda has been writing about exciting learnings from working with hundreds of developers across the world. When he's not spreading the word about the amazing software built at Better Stack, he enjoys traveling, hiking, reading, and playing tennis.
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