Communicating with your clients during a service outage.

25. October 2010 by [JP].

What to do when you go down.
Outages are a fact of life when you have an internet presence. Things can and will go down from time to time.
How you handle it makes the difference to your users.
The most important thing in an outage is COMMUNICATION.
Both initial communication, and ongoing communication are critical during a disruption in service.
Make sure you have other avenues of communicating with your customers, for example, Twitter feeds, Facebook pages, wordpress blogs, are all places that you can publicly disseminate information, and they generally are hosted outside of your affected services.
Your initial posting should be short and to the point. Acknowledge that there is an issue, do not speculate on a repair time, only post facts, give suggestions for alternative contact methods if applicable.
After the initial communication, we suggest updates every 12 hours, generally one in the morning, one around close of business. Simply reassure your users that you are in fact working on the solution… not the problem, but the solution.
Updating more then twice a day is probably excessive, you dont want to overload people with redundant updates, and less then twice a day can give the impression that you are not putting forth enough effort to solve the outage.
Finally, one last notification when the system is back up and running, generally AFTER you test everything. Some people will notice that you’re back online, and will start using the system, and that gives you a good test run to check for lingering errors before announcing that you’re back to 100%.
As much as you want to, you should avoid placing blame on anyone, especially third parties. Most people dont care about the WHY, they just want it fixed. It is, however, appropriate to cite and recolonize people who worked hard in fixing the issue, in your final notification.

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