Website down message to customers: templates you can copy

3 min read · published 2026-10-13

What a good outage message says

Customers forgive an outage faster than they forgive silence. A message that works is short and answers four questions, in this order.

What is broken, in the customer's words. "Checkout is failing", not "elevated error rates on the payments service".
What still works. If sign-in is fine and only exports are slow, say so.
When they will hear from you next. Give a time and keep it, even if the news is "still working on it".
Where to follow along. One link, the same one every time.

Leave out guesses about the cause and promises about the fix time. Both age badly within the hour.

First notice, within 15 minutes: We are seeing [what is broken] since [time, timezone]. [What still works] is not affected. We are on it and will post the next update by [time]. Follow along: [status page link]
Update, when the promised time arrives: Update on [what is broken]: so far we know [what you are sure of, or "no cause yet"]. [What customers can do in the meantime, if anything.] Next update by [time]. [status page link]
Resolved: [What was broken] is working again since [time, timezone]. It was down for [duration]. If something still looks wrong on your side, reply to this message. We will share what happened and what we changed by [date].
Scheduled maintenance, three days before and again the day before: On [date] from [start] to [end, timezone] we are [doing what, in one plain phrase]. During that window [what will not work]. Nothing is needed from you. [status page link]
Follow-up after a long outage: On [date] [what was broken] was down for [duration]. The cause was [one honest sentence]. We have [what you changed] so it does not happen the same way again. We are sorry for the lost [time, orders, work].

The status page first. It is the link in every other message, so there is one place to update instead of five.
A banner inside the app, if the app still loads.
Email only when data or money is involved, or the outage runs past an hour. A ten-minute blip does not need the whole list.
Social accounts: one line and the status page link. Answer replies there, but do not run the incident from them.

Every template above has a [status page link] in it. The worst time to build that page is during the outage.

Open upcontrol.io and type your domain. A public status page for it exists from that moment, free.
Claim the page from its link to move it into your account, then add checks for the pages customers depend on, such as sign-in and checkout.
Pick where alerts go: Telegram, Slack, Discord or email. After three failed checks in a row an incident opens with its cause in the title, so your first notice goes out with facts in it.