When something is down, the instinct is to report it immediately with as little detail as possible. Five minutes of observation first will usually cut the resolution time by more than five minutes — and occasionally reveals that the fault is somewhere you can fix yourself.
1. Establish the scope
Answer these before you write anything:
- Is it one service or several? A website, email and a phone system failing together points at your internet connection or your firewall, not at three separate providers.
- Is it one person, one office, or everyone?
- Can anyone outside your network reach it? Try from a phone on mobile data with wifi turned off. This one test separates "the internet is down for us" from "the server is down for everyone", and they are completely different problems.
2. Note the time it started
Approximate is fine. What matters is a reference point to correlate against logs and monitoring. "It was working at 08:40 and failing at 09:05" is far more useful than "this morning".
3. Ask what changed
Almost every outage follows a change. Consider: software or firmware updates, a new device on the network, an expired certificate or domain, a password change, a payment failure, building electrical work, a new firewall rule, a staff departure. Ask colleagues — the person who made the change often does not connect it to the symptom.
4. Capture the exact error
Copy the text. A browser timeout, a DNS resolution failure, a certificate warning and a server error page look similar to a frustrated user and mean entirely different things to us. The wording is the diagnosis.
5. Check the physical layer
Unglamorous and frequently correct. Are the lights on the router and switch what they normally are? Did the power flicker? Is a cable seated? Was anything moved or unplugged during cleaning or building work? If a device has been power-cycled, say so, because that clears the evidence.
6. Note what you have already tried
Restarts, cable swaps, another browser, another device. Otherwise the first reply asks you to do them.
What to send
Put it in one message:
- What is down, precisely — the address, service or system name.
- Who is affected and from where.
- The time it started.
- The exact error text or a screenshot.
- Anything that changed recently.
- What you have already tried.
- A phone number that works if the outage affects your email.
That last point is easy to overlook. If your mail is down, a ticket reply cannot reach you. Give us a route that does not depend on the thing that is broken.
Mark it High priority, and say why
An outage is a legitimate High. State the business impact in the ticket — how many people, whether customers can see it, whether there is a deadline. That is what drives how it is handled.
