A status page gives customers a clear place to check whether your services are online, degraded, under maintenance, or experiencing an outage. Instead of waiting for support replies or guessing whether a problem is local, users can see the current state of the systems you choose to publish.
Spark Uptime status pages show the status of selected monitors. You decide which monitors appear publicly, so your status page can represent the services that matter most to your customers, such as your website, API, application dashboard, checkout system, DNS endpoint, or support portal.
What a status page should show
A useful status page should answer the customer’s first question quickly: is the service working? Monitor status provides the operational signal, while the message area provides human context.
When to post a message
You do not need a long incident report for every small issue. A short status page message is most useful when customers may be affected or when silence would create confusion.
- Current outage: users may be unable to access a service.
- Degraded performance: the service is reachable but slower or partially unavailable.
- Scheduled maintenance: a planned change may temporarily affect availability.
- Recovery update: the issue is fixed or service is returning to normal.
- Third-party issue: a provider, network, DNS, or upstream system is affecting your service.
How to write effective status updates
Good status communication is short, specific, and calm. Users want to know what is affected, whether you are aware of it, what you are doing, and when they should expect another update.
Say what is affected
Name the impacted service clearly, such as Dashboard login, API requests, billing portal, or public website.
State the current condition
Use plain language such as investigating, degraded, unavailable, monitoring, or resolved.
Give the next step
Tell users whether your team is investigating, applying a fix, waiting on a provider, or monitoring recovery.
Example status page messages
| Situation | Example message |
|---|---|
| Investigating | We are investigating reports of intermittent dashboard errors. Our team is reviewing the issue and will provide another update when more information is available. |
| Degraded performance | The API is currently responding slower than normal. Requests may take longer to complete while we work on restoring normal performance. |
| Scheduled maintenance | Scheduled maintenance is in progress. Some services may be temporarily unavailable until the maintenance window is complete. |
| Resolved | The issue has been resolved and services are operating normally. We will continue monitoring for stability. |
Status page communication best practices
- Use customer-friendly service names instead of internal server names.
- Keep the message short enough to understand at a glance.
- Update the message when the situation changes.
- Avoid overpromising exact repair times unless you are confident.
- Say “we are investigating” when the cause is not confirmed yet.
- Mark the issue resolved only after service is stable again.