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This question was prompted by this answer by employee Mike Frank, from the SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) team.

In his answer Mike states:

We're looking at how we can better plan and notify for these type of events, as well as ways to increase resilience so no interruption in the process is necessary.

I think there already is a perfect way to notify users of these type of events, namely a post on the official "Stack Exchange Network Status" site https://StackStatus.net/. Combine this with a notification bar on the top of the screen that has the title of the status message and a link to the site. This can be limited to the affected pages when applicable, like in the case where Mike's answer was posted to.

Currently StackStatus is poorly maintained. Its Twitter account (@StackStatus) shows far more messages then the site itself does. Most notably the most recent scheduled maintenance wasn't even announced on stackstatus.net.

Can we please reinstate the usage of StackStatus.net and expand on its use, so that those of us that are unable to visit Twitter (e.g. in an environment where it's blocked) can be up to date as well?

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    This is something we've been discussing, making sure we use these communication tools more consistently. We'll come back and answer soon, once we have clarity across the team as to the specifics about posting these updates.
    – Mike Frank Staff
    Commented Jun 22, 2021 at 20:58
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    Thanks for your reply @MikeFrank. I know that in most cases communication isn't the first thing that comes to mind when dealing with outages. You're busy looking for a fix. Users however are very eager to learn more, and to know when they can start using SE again. This is especially true for customers paying forna teams subscription of course. In that sense increased communication is highly desired. I don't think we'll need a status dashboard indicating health of all service though, that might be overdoing it.
    – Luuklag
    Commented Jun 22, 2021 at 21:15
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    @MikeFrank Has there been any update/progress on this in the past 3 or so months?
    – TylerH
    Commented Sep 29, 2021 at 14:00
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    @TylerH, yes internally there has. I'm hoping we can get something out here soon. We realized that stackstatus wasn't updated during last night's maintenance. We've got more maintenance coming up, so at least we have more opportunity to get this right. ;)
    – Mike Frank Staff
    Commented Sep 29, 2021 at 19:29
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    @MikeFrank Thanks for the update! Yeah, that was what prompted me to check :-)
    – TylerH
    Commented Sep 29, 2021 at 19:46
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    Since the changes to the StackStatus website last year (as described in Improvements to site status and incident communication), stackstatus.net will generally be updated more regularly than the @StackStatus Twitter account. Given that, how should this feature request be handled? (Should it be marked [status-completed], and/or maybe closed as a duplicate of that post?)
    – V2Blast Staff
    Commented Jan 17, 2023 at 20:41
  • @V2Blast I'd say status-completed. The new implementation of stack-status was rolled out after this was posted.
    – Luuklag
    Commented Jan 19, 2023 at 7:58

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