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Downtime and outage messages

You must inform your users of any maintenance or downtime that could affect them.

Use the orange warning status message banner on the relevant pages to tell people what is happening and what impact this will have.

Go to the status message component documentation.

Guidelines

If we know what the impact is for our users, tell them. For example, a disruption to the payments system in OASiS means we cannot process payments for article processing charges (APCs). We should be clear to our users about this.

Do not use technical, internal and specialist language. This is not familiar or helpful to our users.

For example:

‘Payment system’ not ‘OASiS’

‘Access to your account’ not ‘Identity Services’

Examples

Planned maintenance

Template

Warning status message banner. Text reads: Planned maintenance. Service or feature will be temporarily unavailable on day, date and time. What's this in my timezone link. During this time, explain impact on user.

With content

Warning status message banner. Text reads: Planned maintenance. Our payment system will be temporarily unavailable on Wednesday 11 December between 09:00 and 10:00 UTC. What's this in my timezone link. During this time, we cannot process payments for article processing charges (APC).

Unplanned outage

Template

Warning status message banner. Text reads: Explain what is temporarily unavailable. Explain the impact on the user. We apologise for any inconvenience caused. Please try again later.

With content

Warning status message banner. Text reads: Payment system is temporarily unavailable. We cannot currently process payments for article processing charges (APC). We apologise for any inconvenience caused. Please try again later.

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