When an outage strikes, your customers don’t just want it fixed—they want to know what’s happening. How you communicate during an incident can be the difference between maintaining trust and losing users. The best companies understand that incident communication is just as important as resolving the issue itself.
In this guide, we’ll break down the golden rules of incident communication, highlight common mistakes, and explore how AI can enhance your status updates.
The Golden Rules of Incident Communication
1. Acknowledge ASAP
The worst thing you can do during an outage is go silent. Even if you don’t know the root cause, acknowledge the issue quickly:
✅ "We're aware of an issue causing degraded performance and are investigating. More updates to follow soon."
❌ "Everything is fine." (While your users see errors everywhere.)
2. Be Clear & Concise
Avoid jargon and technical deep dives—your customers want to know what’s wrong in plain language. Focus on impact:
✅ "Our login system is currently unavailable. Users may experience errors when trying to sign in."
❌ "There’s a connectivity issue with the authentication API resulting in 500 errors."
3. Set Expectations
Users get frustrated when they don’t know when to expect updates. Always give a timeframe for the next status update—even if you have no new information.
✅ "We are investigating and will share another update in 30 minutes."
❌ "We’ll update you when we have more details."
4. Own the Issue
Blaming external services or vague excuses erodes trust. If it's your platform, it's your responsibility to communicate well.
✅ "We’re experiencing high database load, leading to delays. We are working on scaling resources now."
❌ "This is caused by our cloud provider. Not our fault!"
5. Provide a Follow-Up
Once the issue is resolved, don’t just move on—give a post-mortem summary. Users appreciate transparency.
✅ "The issue was caused by a database misconfiguration, which has been fixed. We are implementing safeguards to prevent this from happening again."
❌ "The issue is fixed. Everything should be fine now."
Common Mistakes That Hurt Your Reputation
🚨 “Everything is fine” Denial – Downplaying an outage when users clearly see the problem.
🚨 Vague Updates – Saying “Some customers may be affected” when all users are down.
🚨 Inconsistent Messaging – Saying different things on the status page, Twitter, and customer support channels.
🚨 Delayed Updates – Going silent while users are panicking.
Best Practices from Industry Leaders
💡 GitHub – Provides structured, well-timed incident updates.
In August 2024, GitHub faced a significant outage affecting its website and services like pull requests and the GitHub API. They promptly acknowledged the issue, providing regular updates and transparency about the cause—a recent change in their database infrastructure. Their status page offered timely information, and they communicated the resolution clearly once services were restored.
💡 Slack – Uses human-friendly, empathetic status messages.
Slack experienced a widespread outage in February 2025, disrupting users' ability to log in and send messages. The company quickly acknowledged the problem, offering consistent updates on their status page and through other channels. They detailed their ongoing efforts to repair database shards and reassured users by setting expectations for the next updates.
💡 Cloudflare – Shares detailed post-mortems to build trust.
In October 2023, Cloudflare encountered DNS resolution issues that impacted services like 1.1.1.1 and WARP. They promptly acknowledged the problem, provided regular updates during the incident, and published a comprehensive post-mortem analysis afterward. This transparency helped maintain trust and demonstrated their commitment to preventing future occurrences.
AI’s Role in Improving Incident Communication
Communicating well during an outage is hard. AI-powered tools can help:
- Auto-generate clear, structured updates based on the issue.
- Maintain consistent messaging across multiple platforms.
- Reduce stress for engineers, letting them focus on fixing the problem.
Conclusion & Discussion
Effective incident communication retains customer trust even in difficult moments. Remember:
✅ Acknowledge the issue quickly.
✅ Be transparent and clear.
✅ Provide frequent updates.
✅ Take ownership.
✅ Follow up with a summary.
What’s the worst status update you’ve ever seen? Drop it in the comments!