How to use a status page during an outage

When a service stops working, the first instinct is to check whether it is down for everyone. Many companies publish a status page for this purpose. Used well, it tells you what the company knows. Used alone, it can mislead, because a status page reports what the company has confirmed, not always what you are experiencing. This guide shows how to read one and how to combine it with other sources.

What a status page is

A status page is a public page where a company lists the health of its services and any current or past incidents. Typical entries include components such as “website”, “login”, “API” and “payments”, each marked with a status, plus written updates as the company investigates. Most keep a history, so you can see how often problems have happened.

How to read the wording

Companies use a fairly consistent set of terms, though each has its own style.

Operational. The company believes the component is working normally.
Degraded performance. It works, but slowly or for some people.
Partial outage. Some features or regions are failing.
Major outage. The component is largely unavailable.
Investigating. The company knows there is a problem and does not yet know why.
Identified. The cause has been found and a fix is being prepared.
Monitoring. A fix has been applied and the team is watching to be sure it holds.
Resolved. The company considers the incident over.

Why the page can say “all good” when things are broken

Updates take time. Many pages are updated by people, after an incident has been confirmed. There is often a gap of ten or more minutes.
Some pages are automatic and some are cautious. Companies decide when a problem is serious enough to post. A fault that affects a minority of users may never appear.
It can fail with the service. If the status page is hosted on the same infrastructure as the product, it can go down at the same time. Well-run companies host it separately for exactly this reason.
It reports the service, not your connection. A fault on your side, your network or your account will not appear.

A quick routine that works

Test it independently. Run the address through the website checker. If we cannot reach it either, and our worldwide map shows trouble in several regions, that is a strong sign of a real outage, whatever the status page says.
Open the company’s status page. Look at the component you use, not just the headline. Read the latest update and its timestamp.
Look for the pattern. Check our outage history and the site’s page for recent reports from other visitors. A spike in reports at the same time as your problem points to a shared fault.
Check the company’s other channels. A social media account or support page may be updated before the status page.
If everything says it is fine, the problem is probably yours. Work through the website not loading checklist, or is it down or just me.

Subscribing so you do not have to refresh

Most status pages let you subscribe by email, text message or a feed. If you rely on a service for work, this is worth doing once: you hear about incidents and fixes as they are posted, and you can stop checking by hand. You can also add the service to a watchlist here to be told when our own checks see it fail.

If you run a service

A status page is a promise to be honest in public, and it earns trust when it is quick, specific and written plainly. The best ones say what is affected, what users should do, and when the next update will come, even if it is only “no new information yet”. Our guide on how to write an outage update has examples and a simple template. Host the page away from your main systems so that it stays up when they do not.

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Last updated 2 November 2026. Written by the siteupdown.com team. Spotted a mistake?

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