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PROFESSIONAL-CLOUD-DEVOPS-ENGINEER · Question #160

Your company follows Site Reliability Engineering practices. You are the person in charge of Communications for a large, ongoing incident affecting your customer-facing applications. There is still…

The correct answer is B. Provide periodic updates to all stakeholders in a timely manner. Commit to a "next update" time in. As the Communications Lead during a major incident, you should provide periodic updates to all affected stakeholders (internal and external) in a timely manner, committing to a "next update" time to manage expectations effectively.

Submitted by mateo_ar· Apr 18, 2026Managing a service incident

Question

Your company follows Site Reliability Engineering practices. You are the person in charge of Communications for a large, ongoing incident affecting your customer-facing applications. There is still no estimated time for a resolution of the outage. You are receiving emails from internal stakeholders who want updates on the outage, as well as emails from customers who want to know what is happening. You want to efficiently provide updates to everyone affected by the outage. What should you do?

Options

  • AFocus on responding to internal stakeholders at least every 30 minutes. Commit to "next update"
  • BProvide periodic updates to all stakeholders in a timely manner. Commit to a "next update" time in
  • CDelegate the responding to internal stakeholder emails to another member of the Incident
  • DProvide all internal stakeholder emails to the Incident Commander, and allow them to manage

How the community answered

(46 responses)
  • A
    9% (4)
  • B
    83% (38)
  • C
    2% (1)
  • D
    7% (3)

Why each option

As the Communications Lead during a major incident, you should provide periodic updates to all affected stakeholders (internal and external) in a timely manner, committing to a "next update" time to manage expectations effectively.

AFocus on responding to internal stakeholders at least every 30 minutes. Commit to "next update"

Focusing *only* on internal stakeholders and committing to a frequent update schedule (every 30 minutes) might be too frequent if there's no new information and neglects external customers, who are also affected and need updates.

BProvide periodic updates to all stakeholders in a timely manner. Commit to a "next update" time inCorrect

During a major incident, clear and consistent communication is paramount. Providing periodic updates to *all* stakeholders (both internal and external customers) ensures everyone is informed, even when there's no resolution time. Committing to a "next update" time manages expectations and reduces the influx of ad-hoc inquiries, allowing the incident team to focus on resolution.

CDelegate the responding to internal stakeholder emails to another member of the Incident

As the Communications Lead, managing communications is your primary responsibility; delegating it entirely to another team member without oversight or a defined strategy undermines the role and may lead to inconsistent messaging.

DProvide all internal stakeholder emails to the Incident Commander, and allow them to manage

The Incident Commander's primary role is to lead the incident response and strategy, not to manage all individual stakeholder communications, which is the specific responsibility of the Communications Lead.

Concept tested: SRE incident communication management

Source: https://cloud.google.com/sre/docs/incidents#communication

Topics

#Incident Communication#Stakeholder Management#Outage Updates#SRE Practices

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