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Outage and incident communication templates

During an outage, customers want to know three things: is it you, are you on it, and when will they hear more. Afterwards, they want an honest account of what happened and what you are changing.

Replace the text in [brackets] before sending.

Templates

Incident in progress

Email

Subject: [Product] is partly down: what we know so far

Hi [Customer name],

Since [time and timezone], [what is broken, in plain terms: some customers can't log in, emails are delayed]. Your data is [safe / not affected], and [what still works].

Our engineers are working on it now. We don't have a confirmed fix time yet.

We'll post the next update on [status page link] by [time], and sooner if anything changes. You don't need to reply to this message for us to know you're affected.

[Agent name]

Chat: answering during the incident

Chat

Yes, this is on our side, not yours. [Feature] has been failing since [time]. The team is working on a fix right now. Live updates are here: [status page link]. I'll also message you in this chat once it's back.

Resolved, with what happened

Email

Subject: Resolved: [short incident description] on [date]

Hi [Customer name],

The problem affecting [feature] is fixed. Everything has been working normally since [time and timezone].

What happened: [one or two plain sentences on the cause, without jargon].

How it affected you: [what customers experienced, and whether anything was lost or delayed]. [If relevant: delayed messages have now been delivered / nothing needs to be redone on your side.]

What we're changing: [one to three specific changes that make a repeat less likely].

I'm sorry this got in the way of your work. If you see anything still behaving strangely, reply to this email and it'll come straight to me.

[Agent name]

Tips

  • Post the first update within minutes, even if all you can say is that you know and are investigating.
  • Always name the time of the next update and keep to it, even if nothing has changed.
  • Say explicitly whether customer data is affected; it's the question everyone is silently asking.
  • In the resolved message, list changes you will actually make, not general commitments to reliability.

Avoid

  • Calling a full outage "degraded performance".
  • Guessing a fix time and then missing it.
  • Technical post-mortems full of internal service names customers don't know.
  • Asking affected customers to open individual tickets during a known incident.

More templates

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