At the end of May 2013, I started building a public status page for Shutterstock. On June 3, I followed up with a product colleague and asked to talk about it during the next few days.
The model was the status page Twitter used at the time. I had set up a temporary version on Tumblr and planned for it to live at a Shutterstock status subdomain. The design request was simple and minimal. I wanted it to feel like Shutterstock without turning it into another full product site.
I also included someone responsible for social media because an outage update does not stay on one web page. Customers may look at Twitter, customer support, or other public channels. Those messages need to agree about what is happening and when the company will provide another update.
The source shows the project at its beginning. The temporary page existed, the intended domain had been selected, and I was asking product and social colleagues for ideas and context. It does not establish the final design, publishing workflow, approval process, or launch date.
A public status page had a different job from internal monitoring. Internal systems could include service names, infrastructure detail, graphs, and alerts for the people fixing the problem. Customers needed a short explanation of the current impact and whether the service was available.
Shutterstock had more than 25 million images and one million video clips in its collection by this point. First-quarter customers completed 22.3 million paid downloads. When a service was unavailable, people in many countries could be trying to search or license content at the same time.
The page was a small web project compared with the infrastructure behind the marketplace. It still needed ownership. Someone had to decide when an incident belonged on the page, who could update it, how to keep the message accurate, and what happened after service returned.
This skeleton records the initial implementation and the cross-functional handoff. A complete follow-up needs the final page, its operating procedure, and evidence of the first incident published there.