Torchbox’s new status page

Behind the scenes

Now, we’re using Atlassian Statuspage - the industry standard when it comes to status pages. We wanted a platform that’s easy for non-developers to use, is reliable, and allows clients to subscribe to updates directly.

Designing for reliability

Back in 2009, the internet looked very different. Windows 7 had just been released, Steve Jobs returned to Apple, and the internet tech giants like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud and Heroku were mere toddlers. Since we wanted a way to write content and publish it to the world, we went where many others with the same objective went: Tumblr.

In 2026, Tumblr might seem like an odd choice for a status page. But there’s a reason we stuck with it for so long: Tumblr isn’t built on the major cloud providers - It’s old enough to still be doing almost everything themselves. That means when there’s a large-scale outage caused by the likes of AWS or Cloudflare, Tumblr has historically remained online.

To deliver products and services for our clients, we rely on a number of third-party providers. We could run our own physical infrastructure, but providers like AWS and Google Cloud are far better at operating at that scale than we are. Instead, we want our Systems team focused on delivering as much value as possible.

Atlassian Statuspage, much like the rest of the hosted Atlassian suite (like Jira), runs on AWS. With a few exceptions, most of our clients run on Heroku, AWS and Cloudflare. That means a large-scale AWS outage could theoretically affect our status page as well as our client applications.

Back in 2018, GitHub experienced this when an outage impacted both GitHub itself and its status page, which at the time was hosted on GitHub Pages. We want to avoid creating the same kind of dependency chain where possible.

If either Heroku or Cloudflare experienced issues, our status page would likely remain unaffected. The AWS dependency is not ideal, but ultimately it was a tradeoff we were comfortable making.

As mentioned earlier, Atlassian Statuspage is the industry standard when it comes to status pages. Used by the likes of GitHub, Dropbox, Cloudflare, and many, many more. If it’s reliable enough for them, it’s reliable enough for us. Statuspage itself even has its own status page - powered by Statuspage, of course.

Communication

When we started looking at replatforming our status page, very few of the driving forces were technical. The biggest driver was improving how clients subscribe to and receive updates.

Previously, when we posted an update on our status page, our Support team would manually email clients with a summary and link to the relevant post. This created a few challenges:

• It’s additional manual work. Bulk sending emails is easy, especially with Gmail’s relatively-new mail-merge feature, but it’s still time which can’t be spent doing something else.
• Email isn’t always the fastest form of communication. Many organisations now rely more heavily on Slack or Teams for instant updates, with email being reserved for more asynchronous communication.
• Clients wouldn’t automatically receive ongoing updates. As an incident evolves, we keep our status page updated so stakeholders know what’s happening and what the impact might be. Clients could, in theory, follow a provider’s status page directly, but understanding what those updates actually mean for a specific application often requires context that only Torchbox can provide. Sending repeated email updates manually quickly becomes noisy and time-consuming.

Our stop-gap solution to the above was another 2009-era technology: RSS. Whilst it was somewhat hidden, our Tumblr page included an RSS feed that could be connected to Slack and Teams, moving updates closer to where people were already working. The problem was that setup required manual configuration and, in some cases, unofficial guides.

Atlassian Statuspage not only supports automatic email notifications when incidents are raised or updated, but also includes native integrations with Slack and Teams, alongside a good old RSS feed. These integrations are linked directly from the homepage under a prominent “Subscribe to updates” button, allowing clients to self-serve subscriptions depending on what works best for them.

Whilst the email and Slack integrations are relatively straightforward, the Teams integration requires a little more setup. However, because Atlassian provides and maintains the documentation directly, clients can rely on instructions that are accurate and up to date.

External components

Torchbox’s Application and Hosting Maintenance offering is built on a number of other providers. Historically, many large-scale incidents have originated from those platforms rather than from Torchbox directly. As a result, much of what appears on our status page relates to wider provider outages.

To help communicate this more clearly, Atlassian Statuspage allows us to include the statuses of third-party services directly within our own page. These won’t trigger notifications automatically, but they do provide additional visibility into potential upstream issues.

Because Atlassian Statuspage is used so widely, many of these third-party integrations already exist. We’ve included components for a range of tools and services we use both internally and for clients.

The new site

If you’re reading this and either subscribed to our previous status page or would like to subscribe now, you can head to our status page, click the “Subscribe to updates” button in the top right, and choose whichever option works best for you.

If you were previously subscribed to Tumblr’s RSS feed, unfortunately, those subscriptions will stop working. You’ll need to update to the new URLs. If you have any problems doing this, please reach out.

Hopefully our status page won’t be used too often.