Incident communication

Incident communication keeps users, support, and leadership aligned during failures: state user impact, current status, mitigation in progress, owner, next update time, and follow-up work. Calm, frequent updates reduce rumor and duplicate firefighting.

| Update field | Purpose | |--------------|---------| | Impact | Who cannot do what, severity | | Status | Investigating, mitigating, monitoring | | Actions | Rollback, flag, scale, patch | | Owner | Single DRI for coordination | | Next update | When to expect news | | Workarounds | Temporary user guidance |

					[14:05] IMPACT: 8% checkout failures EU
STATUS: Mitigating — tax flag disabled 13:58
OWNER: @alex
NEXT: 14:20 or sooner if error rate >2%
WORKAROUND: retry after 2 min
				

On interviews: walk through first 15 minutes of a production outage—who you notify, what you say, what you avoid (blame, premature root cause).

Common pitfalls: silent engineering channel; contradictory updates; no ETA; forgetting customer support; skipping postmortem actions.

The trade-off is update overhead during stress versus trust and faster coordinated response.

Checklist:

• Impact in user terms first.
• One incident owner and cadence.
• Separate facts from hypotheses.
• Capture follow-ups for postmortem.