A status page is a dedicated website—typically hosted on separate infrastructure from the main service—that reports whether each component of a system is operational, degraded, experiencing partial outage, or down. It is the primary tool for communicating service health to customers and end users during incidents and maintenance windows.
Status pages pull live data from internal uptime monitoring systems, synthetic checks, and incident management tools. Updates are triggered either manually by an incident commander or automatically via webhooks when an incident begins or resolves. Most pages use a standard four-tier status: Operational, Degraded Performance, Partial Outage, and Major Outage.
When an incident occurs, the page logs the timeline—from Investigating, through Identified and Monitoring, to Resolved—and notifies subscribers via email, SMS, RSS feeds, or Slack integrations. This transparency reduces support load by letting users self-serve updates instead of contacting support.
Status pages also maintain historical uptime logs, usually a rolling 90-day record, which teams use to calculate SLA availability percentages. For example, 99.9% uptime ("three nines") equals 8.76 hours of allowable downtime per year.
TipA status page is most effective when hosted on reliable, geographically distributed infrastructure separate from your main service, so it remains accessible even during an outage.
You can integrate a status page with incident response workflows, on-call scheduling, and customer notification systems to make communication automatic and consistent.