hardScenarioCase StudyExecutiveStaff
You present last week's major outage to the board next week. What goes in the paper, and what stays out?
Board reporting on an outage answers four questions: what customers and the business lost, why the system allowed it, what is already fixed, and whether the same class of failure exists elsewhere. Leave out names, the minute-by-minute timeline and unverified numbers, and own the outcome yourself.
6 min readUpdated 2026-10-10
Answer
Short answer
Board reporting on an outage is not a post-mortem read aloud. The paper answers four questions in order: what customers and the business lost, why the system allowed it, what is already fixed, and whether the same class of failure exists elsewhere. Names, the minute-by-minute timeline, speculation and unverified figures stay out. You own the outcome as the accountable executive, and you finish with what you need from the board.
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Likely follow-ups
- The chair asks whether anyone has been held accountable. What do you say, and what do you refuse to say?
- Your post-incident review is not finished when the board meets. What do you present, and how do you mark what is provisional?
- A board member with a technical background wants the full root-cause analysis. How do you handle that without derailing the meeting?
- The outage was caused by a vendor. How much of the paper is about them, and how much about you?
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