jargon

Architecture & practice·Incidents and what happens after

checkout was returning errors for everyone for eleven minutes, and that is the part customers will remember.

Outage

A period during which the service, or a meaningful part of it, was actually unavailable to users. It is a fact about impact, whereas an incident is a fact about your response — every outage should be an incident, and plenty of incidents never become outages because the response worked. Keeping the words apart is what lets a team say honestly that incidents went up and outages went down, which is usually the sign of a maturing organisation.

Commonly confused with