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Avaloi

Severity levels

What each of the four support severities means, how fast we first reply, how often we send updates, and when we aim to resolve.

Every support conversation and every incident gets one severity: Critical (sev1), Major (sev2), Degraded (sev3), or Question (sev4). Our team sets the severity after they read what you wrote. Tell us what is broken and what it affects, and we pick the level. You can always ask us to raise it.

The four levels

Level Name What it means First reply Update cadence Resolution target
sev1 Critical Many customers cannot serve their sites, or data is lost or exposed. Also any confirmed security breach. 2 minutes Every 30 minutes 4 hours
sev2 Major One customer's live site is down, cannot deploy, or cannot be restored. Also a suspected security issue on one account. 2 minutes Every hour 8 hours
sev3 Degraded Something works badly but the site serves: slow pages, a failing job, a stuck domain, a staging problem. 2 minutes Every 4 hours 24 hours
sev4 Question How-to questions, feature requests, and billing questions with no outage. 2 minutes Once a day 72 hours

The first reply is a target that applies every hour of every day on every plan. Human chat is 24/7. A resolution target is what we aim for, not a promise that the problem is fixed by then.

What the level changes

  • Who answers first. Support answers every level first. If the ticket is not moving, it goes to an on-call engineer on the schedule below, and then to an engineering lead. A sev1 that runs past an hour also gets an incident commander. Times run from when the ticket opens.

    Level On-call engineer after Engineering lead after
    sev1 15 minutes 45 minutes (incident commander at 60)
    sev2 1 hour 4 hours
    sev3 8 hours 24 hours
    sev4 48 hours not used

  • Priority. Each level starts at a priority: sev1 is urgent, sev2 is high, sev3 is normal, and sev4 is low. Business and Enterprise plans move a ticket one priority step up, so a sev2 on Business is handled as urgent.

  • Updates. For a sev1 or sev2, we write to you on the cadence in the table, even when there is no news. The first status note on a sev1 comes within 30 minutes.

  • Customer notice. A sev1 gets a notice to every affected customer and a post-incident review that we publish to them. Reviews are blameless and are written within five business days.

Raising or lowering a level

  • Ask us to raise it. If your site is down and the level says otherwise, say so in the chat. We change it when the facts support it, and we tell you why.
  • Do not ask for a level to get a faster reply. Every level gets the same 2-minute first reply. The level changes who works on it and how often you hear from us.
  • Security reports. Send them to [email protected]. We acknowledge a security report within one business day, even if the report turns out to be a sev4.

Still stuck?

Email [email protected] with your site name and what you tried, or send us a message.