Communication

During an incident, the work of fixing the problem and the work of telling people about it are two different jobs — and the second one is the part your customers actually see. These sections cover writing incident updates people trust, the difference between talking to your own responders and talking to the outside world, running a status page that earns its credibility, and communicating planned maintenance so it never looks like an outage.

In this chapter

Writing incident updates people trustAn incident update is a promise about cadence, a statement of impact, and a small act of honesty all at once. Learn to write updates that tell customers what they actually need — what's broken, who it affects, and when they'll hear from you next — without overclaiming, hedging, or going silent.
Internal and external communication are different jobsThe conversation inside the war room and the message you send to customers serve opposite goals, and conflating them creates leaks, confusion, and contradiction. Learn to run two clean channels — fast and messy on the inside, calm and curated on the outside — and the single role that connects them.
Running a status page customers trustA status page is only worth having if people believe it. Learn what makes a status page credible — honest component scoping, fast and human updates, a hostable history — and the failure modes that turn it into a green light nobody looks at.
Communicating planned maintenance wellPlanned maintenance is the one disruption you get to communicate before it happens — so there's no excuse for it surprising anyone. Learn to announce, schedule, and report maintenance so that expected downtime never gets mistaken for an outage and never erodes the trust your incident comms work so hard to build.