Communicate planned maintenance and active incidents on your status page. This guide covers maintenance windows and incident posts for UK teams keeping customers informed.
Why incident and maintenance communication matters • Creating an incident post • Scheduling a maintenance window • Recurring maintenance • Updating incidents during resolution • Best practices • FAQ
During an incident, the difference between a frustrated customer and a patient one is information. A status page post saying “We’re aware of the checkout issue and working on it, next update in 15 minutes” saves dozens of support tickets and retains customer trust.
Planned maintenance similarly benefits from advance communication. UK shoppers expecting a Black Friday sale can see a maintenance window at 02:00 GMT in the small hours before and know what to expect.
When something is actively broken:
For planned work that will make services unavailable:
During the maintenance window, affected monitors pause and their downtime doesn’t affect uptime statistics. The status page shows the planned maintenance in advance and during execution.
For regular scheduled work (weekly reboots, monthly patching):
0 3 * * 0 = every Sunday at 03:00 UK timeRecurring windows auto-populate the status page — customers see next occurrence listed ahead of time.
Incidents rarely resolve instantly. Update customers as the situation changes:
Professional incident communication
Branded status pages with maintenance windows, incident posts and progress updates — SmartXHosting Uptime Kuma Hosting includes it all for £1/month.
View Uptime Kuma HostingQ: Do maintenance windows affect uptime stats?
A: No. Heartbeats during maintenance windows are excluded from uptime percentage calculations, preserving accurate historical data.
Q: Can I schedule recurring maintenance?
A: Yes. Recurring Interval or Cron strategy with duration. Useful for weekly reboots or monthly patching.
Q: Can customers see past incidents?
A: Yes — status pages show historical incidents. Transparency builds trust.
Q: What if I post an incident and then realise it was a false alarm?
A: Resolve the incident with an update noting “false alarm — services normal”. Transparency beats silent deletion.
Q: Should status page visitors be notified of updates?
A: Status pages have Atom/RSS feed customers can subscribe to. For email subscription, integrate via webhook + mailing list tool.