The unfortunate reality about running a web service is that every now and again, you’re going to have downtime. Even the best web companies have the occasional blip in service. If downtime is inevitable, then it’s best to plan ahead so that you can be ready. After all, prior preparation prevents poor performance.
The goal of a planned maintenance announcement should be to get the right people informed and confident about the upcoming maintenance. Here’s our guide to announcing scheduled maintenance, along with some examples from our friends who are doing it well.
On October 21, 2016 at approximately 4am PST, the internet broke. OK, we know the internet doesn’t “break.” But hundreds of important services powering our modern web infrastructure had outages – all stemming from a DDoS targeting Dyn, one of the largest DNS providers on the internet.
Often I am asked how I always seem calm and poised during incidents. This persona is not entirely accurate as I am more like a duck in these scenarios, calm on top of the water, but paddling frantically under the water. I have learned some tricks that have helped me stay calm and drive incidents to resolution.
The Incident and Component status workflows are now unified in Statuspage, meaning easier incident communication and fewer steps to get status updates to the right people.
Nobody likes an unavailable website. But if you must take your site offline, a clear and well-designed maintenance page can turn around a bad experience.
It takes a village to respond to and resolve incidents. But the teams involved in incident response often work in silos: SREs and devs are heads down fixing the problem, support is flooded with emails/tickets, and marketing/PR may be putting out fires on Twitter. Even if there’s some communication happening over chat or across desks, there’s typically room for improvement with getting these teams to work together when it matters most.
Automatic Twitter posts from Statuspage incident updates now link together into one Twitter thread. This update applies to Tweets that are posted automatically via the Statuspage Twitter integration.
Automatic Twitter posts from Statuspage incident updates now link together into one Twitter thread. This update applies to Tweets that are posted automatically via the Statuspage Twitter integration.
For a couple reasons, building a support team is pretty hard. It’s hard because there are no shortcuts to finding and training the right person. There are a lot more mediocre and poor support advocates out there than there are excellent ones. And the excellent ones are probably pretty happy where they are.
