Proactively notify users during partial, total or unplanned outage

For customer support teams, system outages make for a tough day at the office, but they can also provide you with an opportunity to stand out. During the stress of a major service outage, it’s easy to forget that your customers are often in an even more difficult situation. They are impacted by the outage, but they also have far less information about what is happening. In many cases, they also have their own customers that are asking them for answers. By being an accurate, clear, and timely source of information, you can reduce their stress significantly. It’s also important to make sure your outage message is easily understandable. After all, your artisanal status message means nothing to people who never see it, so wherever you store your status updates, make sure your customers know where to look and simply have access it.

A service outage is know as discontinuity in the provision of a service due to local or systematic failures of the provider. Reduction of the total number and duration of service outages can be achieved by the implementation of preventive service systems and monitoring systems such as a status page. Reliability, availability, recovery, and unavailability are related concepts to an outage. The unavailability is the proportion of a time-span that a system is unavailable or offline. This is usually a result of the system failing to function because of an unplanned event, or because of routine maintenance (a planned event). The term is commonly applied to networks and servers. The common reasons for unplanned outages are system failures (such as a crash) or communications failures (commonly known as network outage).