How do you manage communication with non-technical stakeholders and leadership during an active outage?

In Simple Words: Communicate in plain English, focus on customer and business impact, and provide clear time horizons for the next update. Never use internal jargon like "ZooKeeper partition failure" with executive leadership.

The Communication Principles:

• Jargon-Free: "Customers are temporarily unable to complete checkout on iOS" instead of "The Redis sentinel cluster failed over and dropped socket connections."
• Acknowledge Scope: Clearly state who is impacted and who is unaffected.
• Commit to Cadence: Even if there is no new information, post every 15-30 minutes: "Our team is currently rolling back the latest deployment. Next update will be provided at 11:30 AM."

Practical Script & Summary Template

### Executive Status Update Template:
- **What happened**: Customers on our mobile app cannot finalize checkout orders. Web users are unaffected.
- **Business impact**: Approximately 80 orders per minute are failing.
- **Current action**: Engineering has initiated a software rollback to the previous version.
- **Estimated recovery**: Within 15 minutes.
- **Next executive update**: 11:45 AM EST.