Creating an Incident Response Checklist for Downtime

During an actual outage, a simple ordered checklist prevents wasted time and duplicated effort among whoever's responding.

1. Confirm and Assess

Verify the outage is real (not a local issue) and get a rough sense of scope — is it the whole site, or one specific feature?

2. Communicate

Notify relevant stakeholders and, if appropriate, post a status update for affected customers — silence during an outage often causes more frustration than the outage itself.

3. Diagnose and Fix

Work through likely causes systematically, starting with the most recent changes.

4. Confirm Resolution

Verify the fix actually resolved the issue from multiple vantage points before declaring it over.

5. Debrief Afterward

A brief post-incident review, even informal, captures lessons before they're forgotten.

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