Rootly Auto‑Communications Slash Outage Downtime for Leaders

IT downtime is a critical threat to modern business operations, inflicting significant financial and reputational damage. For over 90% of large and mid-size enterprises, a single hour of downtime now costs more than $300,000, with 41% of firms reporting hourly costs between $1 million and $5 million. [7] During a high-stress outage, the process of manually communicating with stakeholders is often slow, inconsistent, and a major distraction for engineers who should be focused on the fix. Rootly’s automated communication features solve this problem, empowering teams to concentrate on resolution while keeping leaders and customers consistently informed.

The High Cost of Manual Incident Communication

In a typical incident, engineers are forced to scramble. They must identify the right stakeholders, draft status updates, get them approved, and then manually post them across disparate channels like email, Slack, and status pages. This manual approach is fraught with pain points that exacerbate the situation.

• Delays and Frustration: Slow or nonexistent updates leave executives, support teams, and customers feeling confused and left in the dark, eroding trust.
• Inconsistent Messaging: Without a central process, different stakeholders often receive conflicting information at different times, creating chaos and complicating the response effort.
• Increased Cognitive Load: Responders must constantly switch context between diagnosing the technical issue and managing communications, a major source of distraction and burnout.

These communication challenges directly contribute to longer outages and higher costs. The goal is to reduce Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) and human error, which is precisely what automation helps achieve. [3] With 96% of organizations having experienced an outage in the last three years, this is a recurring problem that demands a modern, automated solution. [6]

How Rootly Automates Stakeholder Communication During Outages

Rootly provides powerful tools to automate stakeholder communication during outages, ensuring information flows reliably without manual intervention. This automation is driven by Rootly's Workflows, a core engine that executes pre-defined tasks based on specific triggers and conditions. By setting up these automated workflows, teams can build a communication process that runs in parallel with their technical response.

Building on a Centralized Incident Hub

For communication to be effective, it must originate from a single source of truth. Rootly serves as this central incident hub, providing a unified platform to manage the entire incident lifecycle from detection to resolution. By integrating with alerting tools like PagerDuty or Opsgenie, Rootly can automatically detect issues, initiate an incident, and notify the right on-call engineers, establishing a foundation for all subsequent automated communications.

Using Workflows to Trigger Real-Time Communications

Rootly Workflows operate on a simple yet powerful Trigger -> Condition -> Action model. This allows for highly customizable communication automation tailored to your organization's needs.

Here is a concrete example of a communication workflow:

• Trigger: An Incident is Created or its Severity is Updated.
• Condition: If the Severity is SEV0 or SEV1 AND the incident Type is Customer-Facing.
• Action: Rootly automatically executes a series of communication tasks, such as:
  • Sending a pre-formatted email to an executive stakeholder distribution list.
  • Posting a templated update to a dedicated #leadership-updates Slack channel.
  • Publishing an initial notification to a public or private status page.

Because Rootly supports over 40 integrations, these automated communications can be delivered through the tools your teams already use, including Slack, Microsoft Teams, and email. [4]

Automating Recurring Updates and Proactive Alerts

Consistent communication is just as important as the initial notification. Workflows can be configured to ensure updates are sent at a regular cadence. For example, a workflow can automatically remind the Incident Commander to post a public update every 30 minutes until the incident is resolved, preventing communication blackouts.

For proactive communication, Rootly offers Pulse Workflows. These can be used to track events outside of incidents, like a code deployment from GitHub. A Pulse Workflow can automatically announce a new deployment to a specific channel, giving teams advance visibility into changes that might impact system stability.

The Benefits for Leaders: Slashing Downtime and Building Trust

Connecting automated communication directly to business outcomes reveals a clear return on investment. Leaders benefit from faster resolution times, reduced costs, and stronger stakeholder confidence.

Faster Resolution and Reduced Costs

By automating communications, Rootly frees engineers from manual toil, allowing them to focus entirely on resolving the issue. This directly reduces MTTR and, by extension, the financial impact of the outage. With the average cost of IT downtime ranging from $5,600 to $9,000 per minute for some businesses, minimizing this duration provides significant and immediate ROI. [5]

Increased Transparency and Stakeholder Confidence

Automated, timely, and consistent updates build trust with leadership, cross-functional teams, and customers. Leaders no longer need to chase down engineers for information during a crisis; they are automatically looped into a reliable source of truth. This transparency transforms incidents from chaotic scrambles into organized, professional responses.

Empowering Response Teams

Automation significantly reduces the cognitive load and context-switching that burns out response teams. By offloading the burden of communication, Rootly helps engineers stay focused and effective. This process can be automated from the very beginning; integrations with tools like Honeybadger can automatically create Rootly incidents from error alerts, kicking off the entire communication workflow without any human intervention needed. [8] This lets teams manage the incident without the added pressure of manual updates.

Conclusion: Shift Focus from Communicating to Resolving

Manual incident communication is a bottleneck that prolongs outages, drains engineering resources, and erodes stakeholder trust. It forces your most critical responders to divide their attention when it's needed most.

Rootly solves this by automating the entire communication lifecycle. With flexible workflows, teams can ensure that leaders, customers, and internal stakeholders are consistently and accurately informed from the moment an incident is declared until it's resolved. This allows engineering teams to shift their focus from communicating to resolving, slashing downtime and building a more resilient organization.

Ready to see how you can transform your incident response? Book a demo to see Rootly’s communication automation in action.

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