We understand our clients rely on us to keep their systems operational. Sometimes, we need to plan outages to upgrade our application. Additionally, due to the fundamental nature of the internet, unplanned outages do happen from time to time.
The following is our communication policy for outages:
Planned Outages
When we may need to schedule outages for application upgrades and maintenance, we will:
- Time outages to align with times of minimal traffic.
- Notify all site admins on the TopScore Partners email list at least one week in advance. Admins are automatically added to this list, but if you unsubscribed you can resubscribe here.
- Tweet the status of downtime on our @topscorestatus Twitter account.
- Redirect your users to a status page that informs them that the site is offline for a brief maintenance period.
Note: planned outages lasting five minutes or less may not be emailed about, and planned outages lasting a minute or less may not be put on Twitter.
Unplanned Outages
We use an external monitoring service that notifies us if our application is unreachable. If an outage is detected, we will:
- Provide real time status updates on our TopScore Status Twitter account: @topscorestatus
- If the outage is sustained, provide all admins on the TopScore Partners email list with a timeline for resolution.
- If the outage is sustained, send out a recap and debrief e-mail explaining the issue to all organization admins.
- Perform an audit to ascertain whether we can prevent the issue in the future.
Unplanned outages are rare, and typically only happen as part of a broader disruption to internet service providers.