Major incidents: coordinating and communicating an outage
When many customers are hit at once, individual tickets aren't enough. Recognize a major incident early, declare it, run it with clear roles and one source of truth, link the flood of tickets to a parent, and send status updates that are honest, useful and on time, through to the all-clear.
- Level
- Intermediate
- Length
- About 50 minutes
- Contents
- 3 lessons · 1 video · final exam
- Status
- Published · updated 1 Oct 2026
Skills you'll practise
- Recognize signs that individual tickets are one major incident and declare it early
- Describe the incident commander, operations/subject-matter, communications and scribe roles
- Keep one live record of the incident state and hand over command explicitly
- Write a status update with impact, workaround, what's being done and the next update time, without speculating on cause
- Close the incident with an all-clear, ticket follow-up and a review trigger
Course outline
- 1.Major incidents: the support desk's partVideo · 3 min
- 2.Recognize and declareLesson · 15 min
- 3.Roles and one source of truthLesson · 17 min
- 4.Status updates and closing wellLesson · 16 min
- 5.Major incidents: coordinating and communicating an outage: knowledge checkKnowledge check · 17 questions
- 6.Final exam8 questions · passing it completes the course, so people who already know the material can test out
Sources it draws on
The lessons and questions are written from these references, so learners can go back to the original.
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