Design Status Pages and Uptime Claims Honestly

Feedback & States · status, trust, errors

Updated 2026-08-04

Know what your uptime number actually permits. Three nines allows almost nine hours of downtime a year, and four nines allows under an hour, so the figure on the marketing page is a promise with a specific size.
Host the status page somewhere that survives your outage. A status page served by the infrastructure that is down is the most reliably useless page on the internet.
Say what is degraded rather than whether the system is up. Products fail in parts, and a single green light is wrong more often than it is right.
Update during the incident, not after it. A page that says operational while users cannot sign in costs more trust than the outage does.
Give each incident the four things people need:

Link to it from the product at the moment of failure. Most users never find a status page, and an error message is the one place they are already looking.
Publish partial degradation as its own state. Slow is not down, and users planning their day need to know which one they are in.
Keep history visible. A published record of past incidents is a stronger trust signal than an unbroken run of green, because nobody believes the unbroken run.

An uptime figure is a claim, and the status page is where a product proves it means it.