Explaining Outages & Delays
Aims
Goal: deliver outage news so clearly and calmly that people stop panicking — status, impact, action and next update, even when you have no ETA.
The lesson, stage by stage
- Warm up5 min
Warm-up: Everything is down. Say something.
2 warm-up questions
- Reading10 min
Reading: Communicating About Outages
Read a 202-word text about Communicating About Outages
- Vocabulary8 min
Vocabulary: Outage & Status Vocabulary
7 items
- Framework6 min
Framework: Status Update Template
Status Update Template, 4 steps
- Reading10 min
Reading: One outage, three model updates
Read a 273-word text about One outage, three model updates
- Practice7 min
Practice: Fix the Status Updates
Error-correction exercise, 5 items
- Dialogue10 min
Dialogue: Explaining an Outage to a Manager
Role-play: A department manager calls because their team can't access the CRM system. You know the infrastructure team is working on it, but there's no ETA yet. (8 lines)
- Discussion10 min
Discussion: Your mission: run the updates
3 discussion questions
Open the full lesson
The remaining 7 stages of this lesson, with the procedure, the examples and the exercises, are included with Starter, along with the interactive version you can teach from. Lesson 1 of this course is free: the full plan is on this site, and a free account opens it in the interactive player.
Target vocabulary
In a Tuton account these words become your student's vocabulary deck, so they come back in practice between lessons.
This plan comes from the Tech Support & Troubleshooting course in the Tuton library. Browse all free lesson plans.