Checklists for outages & emergencies

LOOP is built on modern, resilient cloud infrastructure, using Azure, Cloudflare CDN, and best-practice deployment processes designed to minimise downtime and reduce risk. We isolate services, use caching, scaling and continuously monitor sites to make outages extremely rare.

But... no cloud service can ever guarantee 100% uptime. Most outages are quick to resolve and only cause minimal disruption (minutes):

• 99% of issues are self-healing as sites will trigger a restart
• Of the remaining 1%, the majority are quick to debug and resolve with simple troubleshooting steps
• Which leaves us with a small 0.001% chance of wider disruption (where outages might be hours rather than minutes)

The short version - outages cause disruption, but with a little prep you can turn them into opportunities.

Typical emergency timeline

• With 100+ locations on LOOP, we can quickly see if it's a wider issue affecting multiple clients
• We have Statuscake alerts that ping all sites every few minutes — if a site goes down we typically spot it before you do
• If it's only affecting one client: we jump into the hosting portal and CMS to troubleshoot (republishing pages, clearing caches, restarting the site). If we can't resolve in under 10 mins, we'll reach out to you.
• If it's a larger issue across multiple clients: we escalate to suppliers, check DownDetector / Reddit / X, and send email updates to impacted clients if down for more than 10 minutes.

Checklist to have ready

• Keep a log of direct booking links to your ticketing provider so customers can still book from emails/socials
• Have an email campaign / discount ready to send and promote on socials in prolonged outages
• Check common status pages first: Azure, Cloudflare, Umbraco Cloud
• Save emergency@semantic.co.uk to easily reach us — the phones get busy, but we'll keep you updated throughout

Making the most of the opportunity

• Use the outage as a reason for emailing your subscriber list
• Maximise engagement on socials
• Send additional comms once it's resolved to maximise reach + engagement

After it's resolved

• Keep an eye out for messages from us with any follow up
• Review your comms and their effectiveness
• Check key website pages for any leftover glitches (e.g. homepage, news, events, tickets, contact)

Created by Neil Lewin, Modified on Tue, 6 Oct at 2:43 PM by Neil Lewin