Choose the current state
Incident status stages: investigating, identified, monitoring, and resolved
Compare Investigating, Identified, Monitoring, and Resolved so each customer update reflects verified incident state without overstating recovery.
Investigating: symptoms verified, cause unknown
Use this writing checkpoint when the customer-visible symptoms and the affected scope you publish are verified but the cause is not. State what customers experience, when it was observed, what remains unknown, and when you will update them again.
Identified: cause verified, correction underway
Use this writing checkpoint only when the cause you publish is verified. Name the continuing impact, the correction underway, any estimate that is still unavailable, and the next update; do not imply that work underway has restored service.
Monitoring: recovery observed, incident still open
Use this writing checkpoint after your team has verified recovery evidence and is watching whether it holds. Keep any remaining backlog or affected subset explicit, keep the incident open, and separate observation from resolution.
Resolved: recovery and closure verified
Use this writing checkpoint only after your team has verified recovery and closed the incident. State the recovery time, any remaining customer action, and only a follow-up commitment the team can support; do not invent a cause or prevention claim.
Keep lifecycle stage separate from impact
Investigating, Identified, Monitoring, and Resolved describe progress through an incident. Degraded performance, partial outage, or major outage describe customer impact in some status tools. Publish each only from verified facts and follow your platform definitions rather than treating the words as interchangeable.
Recheck every transition
Before changing the published stage, confirm current impact, affected scope, stage evidence, timestamps, unknowns, and the next communication across status page, email, and in-app channels. If the evidence does not support the next label, keep the current label and publish a factual update.
Draft from verified facts.
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