Quick answers
- How do you write an incident update?
- Timeline, impact, cause, and actions. Be factual.
Key takeaways
- State timeline and impact.
- Describe root cause.
- List remediation and prevention.
Instead of → Say
| Instead of | Say |
|---|---|
| We had an outage | Incident from 2–2:40 p.m. 5xx spike. Root cause: unindexed query. Rolled back. Added index and alert. |
| It's fixed | Service restored at 2:40. We're monitoring. Postmortem by EOD. |
Example dialogue
Timeline: Deploy 2 p.m. Errors 2:15. Rollback 2:25. Restored 2:40. Root cause: new query. Actions: added index, performance test.
Common mistakes
- Vague timeline.
- No action items.
Frequently asked questions
- What do you include in an incident update?
- Timeline, impact, root cause, remediation, prevention.
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