Service alerts

What is it?

Service alerts are used to communicate periods of planned and unplanned outages (downtime) to your users, so the impact to them is minimised.

Examples

It is good practice to communicate outages to end users for situations including:

Unplanned outage
Planned maintenance/release
Intermittent issues that may cause errors

Communication can be via a number of different methods, depending on the situation (e.g. planned or unplanned):

Email to users
Newsletter article
Status page / web banner 24 hours prior
Advice via Facebook / Twitter to followers

If possible, you should also communicate an expected window of downtime.

Benefits

Increased trust and reliability
Professionalism
Reduced support