4.4Internal vs. External Communication
The same incident requires very different communication for different audiences.
Internal Communication (Engineering)
Tone: Technical, detailed, honest about unknowns. Content: Full technical details, timeline, root cause hypotheses, action items.
"At 14:12 UTC, the PostgreSQL connection pool on prod-db-01 was exhausted due to a query on the orders table performing a full table scan (50M rows, no index on created_at). The query was introduced in v2.4.0 (PR #3847). Connection pool recovered after manually killing the query at 14:30 UTC. Index deployed at 14:45 UTC."
External Communication (Customers)
Tone: Empathetic, clear, non-technical. Focus on impact and resolution, not technical details.
"Earlier today, some customers experienced errors when trying to complete their purchases. The issue lasted approximately 23 minutes and has been fully resolved. All orders placed during this time have been verified, and no data was lost. We apologize for the inconvenience and have implemented measures to prevent this from happening again."
External Communication (Partners and Regulators)
Tone: Formal, precise, comprehensive. May need to include specific data about impact, root cause, and corrective actions.
"On February 9, 2026, between 14:12 and 14:35 UTC, the checkout service experienced an outage affecting approximately 3,200 users. Root cause: a missing database index caused query timeouts that exhausted the connection pool. No customer data was compromised. Corrective actions include migration failure alerting, query performance testing, and connection pool circuit breakers. Full RCA report is attached."
Status Page Updates
Status page updates are the most visible form of incident communication. They set expectations and reduce the support burden.
Update cadence by severity:
| Severity | First Update | Subsequent Updates |
|---|---|---|
| Sev-1 | Within 5 minutes | Every 15 minutes |
| Sev-2 | Within 15 minutes | Every 30 minutes |
| Sev-3 | Within 1 hour | Every 1-2 hours |
Status page update examples:
Investigating:
"We are investigating reports of errors during checkout. Some customers may experience issues completing purchases. Our team is actively working on this. We will provide an update within 15 minutes."
Identified:
"We have identified the cause of the checkout errors and are implementing a fix. Purchases may still fail for some customers. We expect to resolve this within 30 minutes."
Monitoring:
"A fix has been deployed and checkout is operational. We are monitoring to confirm stability. If you experienced a failed purchase, please try again."
Resolved:
"The checkout issue has been fully resolved. All services are operating normally. We apologize for the disruption and have implemented measures to prevent recurrence."