How to announce an outage or a mistake
This is the only announcement written while the situation is still moving, under time pressure, by people who are tired. It is also the one that gets screenshotted, quoted and read years later.
It is drafted in minutes and quoted for years
Speed and accuracy trade directly against each other here, and they do so nowhere else on this list. Every other post can wait an afternoon for a second reader. This one loses value by the minute while the facts are still arriving, so the writer is choosing between saying something incomplete now and something correct later. The resolution is not to hedge, which is what the instinct suggests and what most drafts do. Hedging produces the conditional register that makes incident notices infamous: some users may have experienced. It protects nobody, because the people reading already know it happened to them, and it converts a factual notice into evidence that the company is managing perception. Say what is known, mark what is not yet known as not yet known, and update.
The rule for this one
No conditionals. State who was affected, for how long, and what is now true. Anything unknown is labelled unknown rather than softened.
What the category publishes, and what the rule produces.
The first draft is a composite written to match the register the ranking pages for this query actually publish. It quotes no company and no real post. The second obeys the rule above and nothing else, so anything that changes between them is the rule doing it.
The version everyone posts
Earlier today some users may have experienced intermittent issues accessing the service. We sincerely apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused. Our team worked quickly to resolve the matter and the service has now been fully restored. We appreciate your patience and understanding.
The version that obeys the rule
The app was down for 47 minutes this morning, from 09:12 to 09:59 UTC. Everyone was affected, not some users. A database migration locked a table we read on every page load. Nothing was lost. We are adding a staging replay of every migration before it runs in production, and that is done by Friday.
Two conditionals in the first sentence. "Some users may have experienced" is addressed to somebody who watched it fail, and it tells them the company is more worried about liability than about the failure.
7 of 10 measured dimensions moved.
Both drafts were read by the engine behind our free brand voice generator. It is arithmetic over the text rather than a judgement, which is the reason it is used here: every figure below can be checked by counting the draft printed above it.
| Dimension | Before | After | Moved |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sentences | 4 | 5 | Yes |
| Words | 44 | 52 | Yes |
| Average sentence, in words | 11 | 10.4 | Yes |
| Longest sentence, in words | 16 | 20 | Yes |
| Contractions per 100 words | 0 | 0 | No |
| Speaks to the reader | No | No | No |
| First person (we, our, us) | 3 | 2 | Yes |
| Second person (you, your) | 1 | 0 | Yes |
| Vocabulary richness, out of 100 | 84 | 87 | Yes |
| Contains a stock phrase | No | No | No |
Read across all fifteen moments the pattern is sharper than any single page: the hub has the corpus numbers.
What earns the post
- The window, to the minute, and the scope stated honestly as everyone or as a named subset.
- Whether anything was lost, answered directly, because that is the only question that matters to the reader.
- One specific change with a date, rather than a promise to do better.
When not to post it at all
Do not skip it because it was short. An unannounced ten-minute outage that a customer noticed is worse than an announced one, because they now know you saw it and said nothing.