How to use statuspage
- Log in
- Guidance for writing incident communications
- When to send notifications
- How to update Statuspage during industrial action
Our status page is found at https://status.notifications.service.gov.uk/.
To log in use https://manage.statuspage.io/login. You should log in using Google Auth if you've been added to in. If not, use details from credentials store.
When there’s an incident, we need to tell our users:
- what has happened
- what the likely impact is
- what (if anything) they need to do
- when they can expect an update
Write in plain English. Do not use formal, technical or long words when easy or short ones will do.
Try to communicate one idea per sentence. The average sentence length should be between 15 and 20 words.
Follow the GOV.UK Notify style guide - especially when it comes to:
The incident name should describe the problem as simply as possible.
Example names for our most severe incidents:
- GOV.UK Notify is unavailable
- The GOV.UK Notify API is unavailable
- The GOV.UK Notify website is unavailable
- Cannot send emails
- Cannot send text messages
- Cannot send letters
- Cannot tell you if messages are being delivered
- API callbacks are not available
- Cannot receive text messages
- Cannot send files by email
- Recipients cannot download files sent by email
- Emails are delayed
- Text messages are delayed
- Letters are delayed
When you report a new incident, use the first line of the message body to provide additional information about the issue.
For example:
- The Notify website and API were unavailable for 6 minutes, from 2:25pm to 2:31pm on Friday 4 November.
- Our print provider is not able to print and post letters.
- Vodafone has an outage of their systems.
Then describe the impact on the user, for example:
- Our text messages are usually delivered in under 1 minute. We currently have an average delivery time of almost 10 minutes.
- There may be a delay in text messages sent to or from Vodafone users.
If we already know that Notify is operating correctly and that the issue is with one of the third parties we depend on, we can say:
The Notify website and API are working as normal.
Next tell users what, if anything, they need to do.
For example:
- You will need to try sending your messages again.
- We recommend that you choose first class postage to reduce the chance of delays.
Finally, tell the user when we will provide more information:
We will update you by midday.
We should try to save our apologies for when an incident is resolved. Or, if it’s a big incident, apologise during later updates when the impact becomes clearer.
Do not apologise if the incident was not caused by us (for example, mobile phone network issues).
For the first message about a new incident, say:
Thank you for your patience.
GOV.UK Notify
In later updates we can say:
Sorry for the inconvenience to you and your users.
Statuspage will send a notification to all subscribers of our statuspage by default every time you create or update an incident.
You must send notifications when you create an incident.
You must send notifications either when the incident moves into monitoring or into resolved. This is so the user knows the incident is finished.
You do not have to send notifications when updating an incident. It is for you to decide whether everyone needs updating. It is not helpful to send notifications for an update that says we are continuing to investigate.