With so much reliance on online services and applications these days, a status page is essential to a business, its support and IT teams. It’s a key component in your incident communication strategy. Communicating the status of your website or service to users (particularly customers) creates trust and keeps them updated—especially during downtimes. Plus, it saves you from sending out emails or using other time-consuming methods to provide status updates.

We all remember when Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram shut down in April of last year for a whole day. And while it was terrible for their company—it’s an educational moment for the rest of us to learn from. Facebook’s status page is self-hosted, and that puts their status pages at risk of the exact issue it’s designed to tell you about.

No matter how much you try to avoid it, incidents are bound to happen. And while your first instinct is to resolve the issue, it shouldn’t be your only priority. By solely focusing on solving the problem and not communicating it to affected stakeholders, like team members and customers, you’re actively making the situation worse. In this article, we’ll discuss what’s incident communication and how to create a strong incident communication plan.

Germany has been called The Land of Data Protection and Security and we as a German company have been asked from the start, do you have EU based servers? And we can finally say YES we do. Our Europe based servers are now generally available, they are specifically located in Frankfurt Germany, so if you’re a European company you can enjoy keeping your (and your customer’s) status page data in the most privacy minded state.

The impact of 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic collectively upended customer behavior with sweeping and immediate changes that we are still feeling the effects of now. As a result people have been forced to live and work differently, which has had a direct impact on consumption patterns and shopping habits. Consumers have for example been displaced from their traditional in-person experiences.

Join our CEO Eduardo Messuti in the Running in Production podcast, where he and host Nick Janetakis talk about the different challenges that go behind the curtains in running a hosted status page & monitoring platform using Elixir and Phoenix since 2017.

Companies all over the world are realizing that to look professional to their users they need to take control of how they communicate system incidents or maintenance updates. The best way of course to do this is through a beautifully presented status page.

If you’re wasting precious time and resources responding to customer emails and phone calls whenever an incident arises - now sounds like a good time to set up your very own status page! A Statuspal status page is a professional and effective way to communicate incidents and maintenance updates internally for your team or publicly to your customers. You would be right in thinking that there are many options available and one of the largest operators in the market is Status.io.

Yesterday April 8th 2021 at around 22:00 UTC, Facebook experienced a major outage where Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp web and Instagram were down, lasting for as much as 3 hours. This was reported at Facebook’s status page, which was a good example of how to communicate and incident.

Yesterday April 8th 2021 at around 22:00 UTC, Facebook experienced a major outage where Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp web and Instagram were all down and unavailable. The last update was reported 3 hours later resolving the incident, so even though the status page doesn’t state the duration of the incident, we can assume it was still affecting some users that long.