Statuspage

Statuspage became the default external communication tool for software companies experiencing incidents, to the point where the product's design patterns — green/yellow/red component indicators, incident update timelines, and subscriber notification systems — became the template that most status pages imitate. Founded in 2013 and acquired by Atlassian in 2016, Statuspage allows organisations to publish real-time service status to a public or private audience, post incident updates, and maintain a historical incident record. The product sits at the customer-facing end of the incident response workflow, making it the interface through which service providers communicate with affected users during outages.

Statuspage integrates with monitoring and alerting infrastructure to automate component status updates — Datadog, New Relic, Pingdom, PagerDuty, and other tools can update component status programmatically via the Statuspage API, reducing the manual work of keeping the status page current during an incident. Subscriber notifications — delivered by email, SMS, Slack, and webhook — go out automatically when incidents are created or updated. The Statuspage API is used by many organisations to build internal dashboards, populate incident.io or FireHydrant status fields, and drive automated incident workflows that consume current service status.

Statuspage service disruptions have a specific, visible irony: the tool used to communicate about outages cannot communicate about its own outage in the normal way. Incident update posting failures mean the engineering team is unable to publish status updates to the public page, leaving subscribers without information during an active outage. Subscriber notification delivery failures prevent email and SMS alerts from reaching users who have subscribed to updates, defeating the notification purpose of the product. Component status automation via the API fails, leaving components showing incorrect historical status while the actual service condition has changed. The Statuspage management interface itself may be unavailable, blocking the operations team from making any changes at all.

Outage.gg tracks Statuspage service status using real-time community reports from engineering teams and subscribers. If incident updates are not posting, subscriber notifications are not sending, or the Statuspage management interface is unavailable, the live status page shows current impact from the Statuspage user community.