Announcements need your own email and SMS accounts. Receipts and password resets send without them, but broadcasting to your whole customer base does not — see Email and SMS. Set that up before an outage, not during one.
Sending one
1
Choose who it goes to
Pick a location, or leave it on every location. One location is right for a fault at that site; every location is right for something upstream that affects all of them.
2
Choose the type
3
Write it
A title and a body. Say what is affected, and when you expect it back. “We are working on it” without a time is the message that generates the most replies.
4
Pick your channels
Email, SMS, or both. The page checks each one before it sends and tells you if a channel is unavailable, rather than reporting success having reached nobody.
5
Send
The announcement is recorded with the time it went out and how many people it reached on each channel.
Reading the history
Every announcement stays on the page with its recipient count per channel. That history is the point: during a long incident it tells you what you already said and to whom, so your second message follows on from the first instead of repeating it.Practical notes
- Send a test to one location first. Both channels cost you money per message at scale, and neither can be unsent.
- SMS is short and expensive. Put the detail in the email and use SMS for the one line that matters.
- Restored messages matter more than outage messages. People who never hear the fault is fixed keep assuming it is not.