Last updated: 2026-02-10
The uncomfortable question nobody asks
If your main product goes down, customers expect your status page to still work.
So here is the question most status page vendors quietly avoid:
What happens if we go down?
This post is not a marketing copy. It is a technical and operational explanation of what breaks, what keeps working, and what tradeoffs exist when a status page provider itself is unavailable.
First: yes, it can happen
There is no such thing as 100% uptime.
Hardware fails. Networks partition. Databases get corrupted. Humans deploy bad code. Anyone claiming otherwise is selling confidence theater.
statuspage.me is no exception.
The difference is not whether failure can happen, but how much of the system survives when it does.
Failure modes we explicitly design for
Before talking about mitigation, it helps to be clear about what can realistically fail.
1. Application layer failure
This includes:
- bad deploys
- panics
- exhausted resources
- dependency timeouts
Mitigation:
- aggressive health checks
- fast rollback
- conservative deploys
- minimal runtime dependencies
If the app is unhealthy, it should fail fast instead of half-working.
2. Database unavailability
The database is the hardest dependency to make resilient.
Failure scenarios:
- primary node failure
- disk corruption
- network split
- migration gone wrong
Mitigation:
- strict migration discipline
- advisory locks
- conservative schema changes
- graceful read-only degradation where possible
Some functionality must stop if the database is unavailable. Pretending otherwise only creates a corrupted state.
3. Network or provider-level outage
This is the category most vendors pretend does not exist.
Examples:
- upstream provider outage
- regional routing failure
- DNS issues
Mitigation:
- minimal external runtime dependencies
- no third-party CDNs for critical assets
- static-first status page rendering
- aggressive caching where correctness allows
A status page that depends on five external services is not resilient. It is optimistic.
What still works when things go wrong
When statuspage.me experiences a partial outage, the goal is not perfection. It is communication continuity.
Specifically:
- already published incidents remain visible
- static status pages continue to load
- cached assets continue to render
- historical data remains accessible where safe
The system is intentionally biased toward read availability over write availability during failures.
This avoids the worst-case scenario: a blank page during an incident.
What does not work (by design)
This is where honesty matters.
During certain failures, the following may be unavailable:
- creating new incidents
- editing components
- sending notifications in real time
- writing new monitoring results
Why?
Because silently dropping writes or pretending updates succeeded is worse than being unavailable.
If the system cannot guarantee correctness, it stops.
Why we do not depend on third-party CDNs
Many status pages load JavaScript, fonts, analytics, or UI frameworks from external CDNs.
During a real outage, those CDNs may also be degraded or blocked.
statuspage.me avoids third-party runtime dependencies for status pages because:
- a status page should not depend on the same internet assumptions as the broken product
- fewer dependencies means fewer correlated failures
- privacy and resilience often align
This is not ideological purity. It is operational pragmatism.
Notifications are handled differently
Notifications are never fire-and-forget.
Emails, webhooks, and integrations are:
- persisted
- retried
- processed asynchronously
If the notification system is unhealthy, messages queue instead of disappearing.
Delayed notifications are bad.
Missing notifications are worse.
The uncomfortable truth about guarantees
No status page provider can guarantee:
- zero downtime
- instant incident updates
- perfect global availability
Anyone who claims otherwise is redefining words.
What can be guaranteed is:
- clear failure boundaries
- honest behavior under stress
- no silent data loss
- no fake uptime
That is the bar we aim for.
Why this matters more than feature lists
Most status page comparisons focus on:
- components
- templates
- integrations
- pricing tiers
Almost none talk about failure behavior.
But when things go wrong, features do not matter. Behavior does.
A status page exists for the worst day, not the best one.
Final note
If statuspage.me goes down completely, that is a failure.
But if it goes down honestly, without misleading users, without hiding incidents, and without pretending everything is fine, then it is at least failing in the right way.
Resilience is not the absence of failure.
It is refusing to lie when failure happens.
