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Reading Incident Reports

Understand how we communicate during and after service incidents.

Incident Lifecycle

Every incident goes through these stages:

flowchart LR
    A[🔴 Investigating] --> B[🟡 Identified]
    B --> C[🔧 Monitoring]
    C --> D[✅ Resolved]
Stage What It Means
Investigating We've detected an issue and are determining the cause
Identified We know what's wrong and are working on a fix
Monitoring A fix has been deployed, we're confirming it works
Resolved The issue is fully fixed and verified

Incident Severity Levels

Severity Icon Impact
Critical Complete service outage
Major Significant functionality impacted
Minor Degraded performance or partial issue
Informational Maintenance or known issue with workaround

What's in an Incident Report?

During the Incident

  • Title – Brief description of the issue
  • Affected Services – Which services are impacted
  • Current Status – The stage in the lifecycle
  • Updates – Timestamped progress notes

After Resolution

  • Duration – How long the incident lasted
  • Root Cause – What caused the issue
  • Resolution – What we did to fix it
  • Prevention – Steps taken to prevent recurrence (for major incidents)

Example Incident Timeline

Sample Incident

09:15 UTC – Investigating

We're investigating reports of website timeouts affecting shared hosting customers.

09:32 UTC – Identified

The issue has been traced to a network switch failure in our EU datacenter.

10:05 UTC – Monitoring

A replacement switch has been installed. We're monitoring to confirm full restoration.

10:45 UTC – Resolved

All services have been restored. Total downtime: 1 hour 30 minutes. A full post-mortem will follow.

How to Find Past Incidents

On the Status Page

Scroll down to the "Past Incidents" section to see recent incidents grouped by date.

In Your Email

If you're subscribed, you'll have email records of all incidents that occurred since subscribing.

Understanding Impact

Some users or services are affected, but not everyone:

  • Only EU servers affected
  • Only email service, not websites
  • Intermittent rather than complete failure

The entire service is unavailable for all users.

The service works but is slower than normal:

  • Longer page load times
  • Timeout errors under heavy load
  • Delayed email delivery

What We Do During Incidents

  1. Alert – Our monitoring detects the issue automatically
  2. Triage – Engineers assess severity and impact
  3. Communicate – We post to the status page and send alerts
  4. Fix – We work to resolve the underlying issue
  5. Verify – We confirm the fix works before marking resolved
  6. Review – For major incidents, we conduct a post-mortem

Post-Incident Reviews

For significant incidents, we publish a detailed review including:

  • Timeline – Detailed sequence of events
  • Root Cause Analysis – What failed and why
  • Impact Assessment – Who was affected and how
  • Lessons Learned – What we'll do differently
  • Action Items – Specific improvements we're making

Have Questions About an Incident?

If you need more information about a specific incident:

  1. Check the status page for updates
  2. Wait for the post-mortem (for major incidents)
  3. Contact support with specific questions